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ACCORDING T 
SAINT JOHN 


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BOSTON 
_LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
1925 


Copyright, 1925; 
By LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 


All rights reserved 


First Impression October, 1925 










THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS PUBLICATIONS 
ARE PUBLISHED BY 
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
IN ASSOCIATION WITH 






THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY 


PRINTED IN THE UNrrep Strares or AMERICA 


I dedicate this essay 
which can only claim to be adventurous 
to the dear memory of 
GEORGE RIDDING 
Forty-third Headmaster of Winchester 
First Bishop of Southwell. 
I cannot tell what unexpected but illuminating 
comment he would have made on its conclusions 
but I know how much whatever 1s workmanltke 
in 1ts argument or worthy in its aim 


1s due to him. 


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PREFATORY NOTE 
TO THE AMERICAN EDITION 


My special thanks are due to Mr. Ellery Sedgwick, who has 
most kindly assumed the responsibility of correcting the proofs 
of this book. Without this great help, which must have been 
laborious, this edition could not have appeared at the same 
time as the English edition. I must also thank Mr. M. A. 
DeWolfe Howe, because without his encouragement and in- 
sistence I do not know when I should have finished the book. 
Many other friends have helped me with advice while I have 
been writing, but I name none, since I do not wish to make 
any of them even appear to be responsible for my views. 


CHARNWOOD 


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CONTENTS 


CHAP DER | 


INTRODUCTION 


Does modern learning make the figure of our Lord less clear or more clear ? — 
Reasons for discussion of this question by a writer who is not a divine — Plan of 
this book — How the New Testament should be read 


CHAPTER II 
THE QUESTION OF DATE AND THE OLDER CRITICS 


General rough agreement as to period within which this Gospel was written — 
Breakdown of earlier theory which dated it much later — Lingering prestige of 
that theory, and failure of much modern criticism to learn from its failure 


GHAPTE RAITT 
THE DIRECT EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP 


The tradition connecting this Gospel with St. John was well founded — The 
claim to the same effect implicitly made by the Gospel itself cannot be set aside 
lightly 


CHAPTER : IV 
THE “ELDER” AND THE ADVANCED CRITICS 


The theory now frequently held, that this Gospel is by one John who was not 
the Apostle, is untenable; and the arguments used for it suggest a serious reflec- 
tion upon the standard of scholarship prevailing among many “advanced” 
critics 


CHARLEY Vi 
THE MAN, SAINT JOHN 


The scattered, but fairly numerous, notices which we find of him combine to 
produce a consistent and vivid impression of his character . 
1x 


II 


22 


36 


46 


x CONTENTS 


CHAPTER VI 


SOME LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BOOK 


It is a compact artistic whole, with a dramatic quality — It has certain in- 
tensely Jewish qualities — The literary art employed is not limited to imparting 
a dramatic quality to it — And the dramatic or poetic element in it is combined 
with many signs of an historical intention, which signs cannot at all be explained 
away on the ground that the intention is allegorical —A passionate interest 
in the actual historic Jesus (rather than in any doctrine about Him) is in certain 
parts of it (if not throughout) clear 


CHARTERS NIT 


THE ACTUAL WRITER OF THE GOSPEL AND EPISTLES 


The evidence connecting the Gospel in some way with St. John is irresistible 
(subject to a later question about its doctrine) — This does not necessarily imply 
that he actually composed this book, and the launching of it upon the world by a 
writer among his pupils using what he heard from him is quite a natural supposi- 
tion, though only natural if it was known to have substantially St. John’s au- 
thority behind it — Certain features of the Gospel make it on the whole probable 
that it was not actually composed by St. John, though this cannot be taken as 
certain — Parallel considerations applied to the First Epistle make it certain that 
St. John himself was the actual author of that Epistle 


CHAP DER VV IU 


THE GENERAL CHARACTER OF THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY 


The considerations in the last two chapters cause some uncertainty (which may 
always remain) as to the historical authority to be attached to this Gospel in some 
details; but the extent of that uncertainty is much reduced when we consider 
more clearly the writer’s purpose and method — His so-called doctrinal intention 
involves an intense interest in certain great facts of history, and (this being 
observed) we can see that his interest extends to many lesser matters — We 
further notice that he supposes some parts of the story to be already known, and 
that he writes with reference to St. Mark, sometimes correcting, sometimes as- 
suming his narrative and supplementing it — It seems, however, a mistake to try 
to make a complete and consistent narrative out of the two, since each was 
probably quite indifferent to minute questions of chronology — We may take it 
as a fact that our Lord paid several visits to Jerusalem — What this Gospel adds 
to the story of the Baptist, and of the calling of the first Apostles, seems also 
historical — Some observations as to the character of the scenes with the Jews in 
this Gospel — The account of our Lord’s trial in this Gospel examined — General 
conclusions as to the historical value of the book — But the one important ques- 
tion is that of the next chapter 


79 


ror 


CONTENTS 


CHAPTER IX 


OUR LORD AS SEEN IN THIS GOSPEL 


We should (apart from the considerations in the last chapter) expect of this 
writer some true impression about our Lord’s character — A sufficiently certain 
and full knowledge of that character, for us to test this, is given us by the other 
Gospels — Several considerations make us regard chapters xiii to xvii as the most 
certainly trustworthy and most important part of this Gospel — These give a fresh 
and living portrayal of our Lord — It is convincing, and was surely not invented 
— Statement of certain things thought to be present elsewhere in this Gospel 
which are thought to conflict with our knowledge of our Lord — Above all, this 
Gospel may be thought to conflict with St. Mark’s account, which we cannot but 
believe, of our Lord’s gradual disclosures of His full claim to allegiance — The 
extent of these discrepancies is not so great as it seems — But they do exist — 
So far as they exist they are consonant with all that we can tell about St. John or 
about this Evangelist — And this wider consideration of the Gospel should con- 
vince us that the scene at the Last Supper presents the true lineaments of our 


Lord : , : : : : A A ; : 2 : 


CHAPTER X 


A FURTHER TEST OF OUR RESULT REQUIRED 


Allegation that the doctrine put into our Lord’s mouth in chapters xii to xvii 
is not that which the Apostles first taught but the result of a development due to 
foreign influences — Some kind of growth or development in the Apostles’ belief is 
a fact; the question is as to what kind — Plan of the chapters following in which 
this question is to be examined — Notice the fallacy of regarding Christianity 
primarily as a defined doctrine — Consideration in advance of the amount of re- 
liance which we shall be able to place upon the first three Gospels. ‘ 


CHAPTER XI 
THE JEWISH BACKGROUND OF CHRISTIANITY 


Christianity began as a development of Judaism — The completion of the 
prophets’ work and the consequent growth of an intense monotheism after the 
Captivity — Growth of belief in immortality and of an intense study of the Law 
and morality in centuries preceding our Lord — Growth also of expectations as to 
some great future event, extending (in one of two opposite ways) God’s reign over 
the Gentiles — Connected with this is the figure of the Messiah — Examination 
of some of the most important passages of the Old Testament in this connection 
— The confused and conflicting but ardent hopes that were common among the 
Jews when our Lord came . : j ; : : : ; : ; : 


121 


150 


160 


Xl CONTENTS 


CHAPTER XT 
THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT OF THE FIRST CHRISTIANS 


What surrounded the Jews was in some respects (though in others not) the 
modern civilized world — Influence of the Roman Empire on men’s ideas — 
“ Hellenistic” civilization of the Eastern Empire, involving a sort of “ Humanism” 
and a widespread intellectual activity, though not of the highest kind — Real 
philosophy at an end, but very earnest and active moral teaching succeeded it, 
and some science survived — Change of old beliefs, rise of new and resurrection of 
older cults, and general mixture and ferment of beliefs, so-called philosophies, and 
superstitions — The (Pagan) Gnostic theology, including a figure said to be 
analogous to our Lord’s — The Mystery religions and their great figures said also 
to be analogous to Him; their origins, general features, wide differences, points of 
resemblance with Christianity — Some estimate of their prevailing moral and 
intellectual tone; Plutarch and Apuleius — A “seeking after God” . 


Note: as to some books on the above subjects. 


CHAPTER XIII 
PAGAN INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 


Our question concerns not later centuries, when such influences are clear enough, 
but very early years; and it refers to the fundamental ideas of Christianity — 
Some at first sight startling resemblances are demonstrably due to the Jewish 
origin of Christianity — Bousset’s point about the word “Lord” — The origin 
of the Eucharist — The conclusive effect in regard to the present question of the 
evident facts about the Eucharist and about belief in the Resurrection — St. 
Paul’s rootedly Jewish beliefs, the evident effect of the Jesus Christ of history 
upon him — His entire repugnance to Paganism, though not to Pagan people or 
their language — The way in which Agnostic and Mystery ideas and language 
did actually affect him — Fundamental contrast between the whole temper 
and spirit of Christianity and that of these religions to be seen in many points and 
amounting to a radical incompatibility, moral and intellectual, which excludes 
the idea of such an influence as is alleged — The real influence of the Gentile world 
upon the growth of doctrine : ; : ; - é ; ; : . 


CHAPTER XIV 
OUR LORD IN THE FIRST THREE GOSPELS 


Meaning of the “Kingdom” which our Lord came preaching — The fact 
that He did effect an immense change in men’s whole tone towards morality and 
life — The secret that was “revealed to babes” — The peculiar characteristics 
of that morality which our Lord did bring — It is essentially bound up with men’s 
attitude to the Father and to Him — His teaching was inseparable from the effect 
He produced as a person — He claimed a unique position —-His “ Fschatology” 


187 


211 


CONTENTS 


— His dealing with the idea of the Messiah — “The Son of Man” — Other ways 
in which His consciousness of what He was is marked — His death as the crown 
of His life to be considered in this connection — Sum up the results of all this in 
regard to what His “doctrine” of Himself was — And notice the manner in 
which His disciples had to learn it 


CHAPTER XV 


X1ll 


239 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF DURING THE TIME OF THE 


APOSTLES 


Sum of the argument so far — St. John’s is but an intense and concentrated 
expression of the teaching in the other Gospels, of which other Gospels the 
trustworthiness is now apparent — But we must note the course of development 
in the Apostles’ teaching — The title “Son of God”’ — The several causes which 
compelled the Apostles to think out their belief — The true relation between 
St. Paul’s mission to the Gentiles and the earlier building up of the Church 
among the Jews; and the relation of both to our Lord’s design — Significance of 
St. Paul’s characteristic insistence on the Cross — The idea of “ redemption ” 
running through the whole Apostolic teaching — The contrast, to the end of the 
New Testament and to this day, between the way in which different men present 
the same Christian idea to themselves — The extreme difference and yet visible 
unity of St. James and St. John — Conclusions as to the place of this Gospel and 
of St. John’s Epistles in the ordered whole of the New Testament 


CHAPTER XVI 
EPILOGUE 


Certain reflections of the writer’s  . ; ; : : A 


262 


282 


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7, 





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ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


I 
INTRODUCTION 


Have the long controversies about the Gospel according 
to St. John led to any real results? If so, can an ordinary 
reader use these results so as to learn more about our 
Lord? 

When a man whose special studies and experiences 
have lain in fields far away from those of the theologian 
turns to such a subject as this, he exposes himself to the 
risk of making many blunders and it is unlikely that his 
knowledge will at all points be up to date. But he has 
some advantages and may use them. On some much 
debated questions he will welcome the right answer — 
that we do not know. He can dismiss erudite specula- 
tions of the futile kind more boldly than theologians 
are permitted to do by the courtesy now common among 
them. Above all, his very inexperience may keep more 
fresh his sense of what he is really seeking, which is to 
discern more completely and more clearly the lineaments 
of the historic Jesus Christ. 

“These books,”’ said Erasmus, “bring back the living 
image of that most holy mind, and Christ himself .. . 
the whole of him, is here so rendered present that you 
would see less of him if you beheld him before your eyes.” 


4 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Now there are questions about the New Testament 
which criticism of sources and study of antiquities will 
not help us to solve. Little or no light can be thrown, 
by settling the origin of any document, upon that puzzle 
concerning miracle which seems to be appointed for 
Christians of our time; for the ready belief of one man, 
the robust incredulity of another, and the uncommitted 
wonder of a third in this matter do in fact remain as they 
were before, when any possible eyewitness has been ad- 
mitted or rejected. Again, it is not possible so to piece 
together and reunite the fragmentary narratives of the 
Gospels as to supply in our Lord’s case those biographical 
details which a modern writer might think of the first 
importance in composing for a cyclopedia an account 
of some slighter figure. But the Gospels, with their 
splendid brevity, have seemed to many simple minds, as 
they seemed to the great humanist, to tell incomparably 
well things about this historic figure, in relation to which 
these unanswered questions become trivial and tiresome. 
Will the Gospels seem to do so less if the full light of 
modern humanism, with all the new facts and new queries 
of which it has to take account, be turned upon them, or 
will they seem to do so more? I believe that the true 
answer is the latter; and the slight study which follows 
is an attempt to illustrate this in some small degree. 

That study falls into two parts, of which the first is 
concerned more directly with the Fourth Gospel itself 
and with matters which have an obvious bearing upon it, 
while in the second I must travel further afield. The 
questions on which the first part — ending with Chap- 
ter 1X — must touch may be set down in order thus : — 

(1) Can it be shown that this Gospel is early enough 
for a disciple of our Lord to have written it or directly 
influenced the writing of it? 


INTRODUCTION 5 


(2) What is the value of the testimony which associates 
it with a particular disciple, the Apostle St. John? In- 
cidentally, it 1s necessary to speak of the view which — 
to my mind, fantastically — ascribes the Gospel to an- 
other man of the same name. 

In dealing with these two questions I may pass over 
some points which have at one time or another been 
much discussed, for I cannot bring myself to treat very 
seriously the doubts which still subsist about these two 
questions. On the other hand, I shall dwell longer 
than might seem needful on certain points in past con- 
troversy, because of the light in which they set the whole 
subject of the origin of the Church and its beliefs. And 
I shall not hesitate to insist upon some matters which are 
already very well known to scholars. They are not well 
known to the general readers to whose interest I would 
especially appeal; and it is the besetting sin of aspiring 
special students to treat that which is well known or 
obvious as if it did not exist. 

(3) Does this Gospel purport to be simply history? 
Or is it dramatic—or even, as some have thought, 
allegorical —in its intention? In general, the liter- 
ary character of the book has hardly yet been enough 
considered. 

(4) Does consideration of the above matters lead us 
to regard the Gospel as actually written by St. John, 
or rather as the composition of some followers of his, no 
doubt possessed of recollections of his and inspired 
throughout by his teaching ¢ 

The latter suggestion must not be thought to be 
far-fetched or to be a sort of compromise. Some such 
sort of mediate authorship is a thing of very common 
occurrence. We meet with it in infinitely varying forms 
in the recorded teaching of Socrates, in that of Aristotle, 


6 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


in textbooks on many branches of knowledge, and in 
innumerable dispatches and reports of modern men 
of state. Again and again, the man whose name Is at- 
tached to a writing was certainly not the actual writer; 
and yet it may be none the less certain that substantially 
it has his authority and is the expression of his mind. 

Personally, I incline to the opinion that the Gospel 
according to St. John is not his direct handiwork, though 
I would not say the same of St. John’s Epistles. Nor do 
I at all think that the sense of disillusionment, or even 
pain, with which many people might at first receive this 
view is one which will remain after full consideration — 
far from it. But all the same I am bound to express an 
even more unacceptable opinion: I think this is a ques- 
tion which we must be content to leave in some doubt. 
Such conclusions as we need to come to about the histori- 
cal value of this Gospel should allow for the doubt. 

(5) Having in mind this doubt, and the various doubts 
which consideration of the nature and purport of this 
Gospel may suggest, may we still use it for any strictly 
historical purpose at all? I feel sure that for the only 
really important historical purpose here, that of learning 
more about the true figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the 
spirit of His teaching, we may use this Gospel with con- 
fidence, though not necessarily without thought and 
study as far as matters of detail are concerned. 

This, of course, is the real gist of my book. But I 
prefer to handle the matter rathér briefly; not, so to 
speak, to dwell lengthily on the subject myself, but to 
offer my readers a clue which they can follow up for 
themselves. 


Here I might have ended, but I have been led to 
extend my study over a wider range. I had come without 


INTRODUCTION 7 


hesitation to the conclusion which I express in Chapter 
IX about the view which this Gospel presents of our 
Lord; and it is not, so far as I can make out, a very 
different conclusion from that at which scholarly people 
studying this Gospel itself and with no fixed preconcep- 
tion about Christian doctrine, generally arrive. But I 
am struck by the persistence with which many theological 
students seem to brush aside any such conclusion on 
general grounds; whatever conclusion, they seem to say, 
you might draw from a mere study of this Gospel, Jesus 
of Nazareth did not at all conceive of Himself as it rep- 
resents, for research shows that that whole conception 
of Him was wrought into Christian belief after His time, 
under influences quite independent of Him. 

Now it would not, I think, be fair to all my readers to 
answer this with any curt explanation that this achieve- 
ment of research is mythical. We want to have some 
positive idea of how that growth of Christian belief 
which we may notice in the New Testament did take 
place. Thus I shall attempt at least to outline a defi- 
nite view upon certain further subjects : — 

(a) The extent to which the presentation of our Lord’s ° 
teaching in the first three Gospels may be taken as it 
stands, or the extent to which it has received some twist. 

(b) The Jewish antecedents of Christianity. 

(c) The pagan environment in which it grew up and 
the actual influence of that environment upon the New 
Testament writers. 

(d) Having regard to all these matters, what is the 
place of this Gospel in the New Testament as a whole, 
and in the development of Christian belief? Does it, in 
view of all this, seem to give a remote and dim or distorted 
image of Jesus, ifany? Or does it substantially represent 
the maturest understanding of Him? 


8 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


If I were now starting afresh to treat these topics com- 
prehensively, I should probably design my book upon 
some other plan. But I let the book go in the shape in 
which it has grown under my hands. That shape cor- 
responds pretty closely to the course which my own 
actual study of the subject has followed, with many 
interruptions, during some years. Likely enough, this 
may make it to most readers more useful than any more 
ambitious effort of mine could be. It will, I hope, fall 
into the hands of some readers who can skip judiciously. 
The above explanations and a brief Table of Contents 
should help them to do so. Chapters VI, IX, and XIV 
contain the chief contributions which I hope I may have 
been able to make to the discussion. 

Whatever these contributions may be worth, I am 
sure that the book is in certain respects an attempt which 
ought to be made. Christian thought and Christian life 
stand to gain by the unembarrassed handling of some 
of the questions on which I have touched. I will not at 
this point indicate why this Gospel peculiarly requires that 
its literary character should be more closely examined, or 
‘apologize for the momentary shock which such exam- 
ination will cause some people. But in general I believe 
that the disappointing looseness of a good deal of New 
Testament criticism arises from the frequent failure 
of the critic to read the books of the New Testament as 
good books should be read. It is of course impossible 
for intelligent men and women, whatever be their pre- 
conceived opinions, to read such literature without pe- 
culiar feelings of reverence, yet it should be read with a 
no less alert mind and no less capacity for frank enjoy- 
ment than we bring to the study of any other books 
which we read because we want to read them. As it is, 
religious students of the Gospels are liable to feel the’ 


INTRODUCTION 9 


lingering influence of a doctrine of verbal inspiration 
which hardly any of us now maintain in principle. Pious 
scholars have easily freed themselves from that influence 
in studying the Old Testament and even in studying St. 
Paul, but naturally and rightly, it is not so easy to do so 
when we read what is presented to us as spoken or done 
by Jesus Christ Himself. Nevertheless, His presence 
will become more clear to us through the full recognition 
that His life on earth was recorded by men and through 
the effort to understand sympathetically their limitations 
and their human weakness and strength. There is no 
necessity that every ordinary reader should trouble him- 
self very much to do this, but preachers sacrifice something 
of their power of teaching and orthodox scholars hamper 
themselves much in dealing with the difficulties which 
they meet if they do not make this preliminary effort. 
Their failure, however, is slight in comparison with that 
of many who may be counted as emancipated and 
advanced. Microscopic examination of the Gospels and 
of other early Christian books is a good thing, upon 
condition that it does not begin by losing sight of their 
more obvious features; and the main requisite for the 
study of any author is, first, to let him tell his story in 
his own way. 

One more word of preface. This is primarily an essay 
in historical criticism. I approach my whole subject 
in the cool temper of such criticism, so far as I can. So 
far as I can. ‘The mind is not made in water-tight com- 
partments, and the critical student of Christian origins 
who professed that his studies in no way excited him ' 
would really be boasting that his brain did not function 

_ properly. Moreover, if it be the result of these studies 
to bring us into a presence which to the normal mind is 
“dear, and awful, and strangely near, that result is a fact 


IO ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


of science, to be reported and reckoned with as such. 
But strong feeling is one thing and illusion quite another. 
I have long and earnestly tried to free my mind from 
illusion in these matters — an effort which I believe to be 
part of the religious duty of a Christian. 


I] 
THE QUESTION OF DATE AND THE OLDER CRITICS 


Tue evidence that the Gospel according to St. John 
proceeded from the Apostle of that name consists of what 
we are told by several writers in the last years of the 
second century, corroborated by certain passages in the 
Gospel itself or in the First Epistle of St. John, which 
seem intended to point us to the same conclusion. But 
those who, for various reasons, think the contents of 
this Gospel unlikely to have proceeded from an Apostle, 
set aside the authority of the said writers as being too 
late, while the passages just mentioned are the subject 
of much dispute; and formerly at least it was often 
alleged that traces of this book in other writings are not to 
be found so early as they would be if it were really Apos- 
tolic. It will be convenient to speak first of its date, 
without reference to its authorship, and to state first 
the results of evidence which is all but undisputed. 

This Gospel was written later than the Gospel accord- 
ing to St. Mark, for it contains passages in which the 
writer evidently had St. Mark before him, though none 
which make it certain that he knew either our first or 
our third Gospel. This may be taken to prove that it 
was written after 70 a.D., which was the date of the 
destruction of Jerusalem. ‘There are also features of it 
which suggest that when it was written the influence of 


12 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


that great catastrophe had been felt for some years, and 
there is some force in the tradition of the Church which 
regards St. John’s as the latest of the Gospels. There 
is no reason to question the general verdict of scholars 
now, which would fix the year 90, or some would say 
80 A.D., as the earliest possible date for the appearance 
of this book. Nothing really turns upon the particular 
conjecture which we may think likeliest upon this point. 
Perhaps it should be recalled that it is a most elaborate 
work, presumably begun long before it was completed. 

What is the latest possible date for its completion? 
There was a time when very impressive authority con- 
signed it to the period between 160 and 170 a.p. The 
indisputable evidence of references to the book found 
in other writings has long since made this opinion un- 
tenable. To-day there is indeed a minority — negli- 
gible, for reasons soon to be given — of scholars who con- 
tend for a rather late date, soon after 132; but all other 
critics would agree in saying that clear references to or 
quotations from this Gospel in writers of the second 
century make it certain that it was written by 130 A.D. 
at the very latest — which does not mean that any of 
them think it was anything so late. Clear-cut evidence, 
such as quotations furnish, does not carry us beyond 
this point. There are several passages in Ignatius and 
Polycarp, who wrote by 115 a.p. at the latest, in which we 
may fancy that the writer echoes this Gospel or the First 
Epistle; but while, if any two of us consider these pas- 
sages, each will probably feel sure that (say) one of them 
is a quotation, it is improbable that we shall both fasten 
upon the same one. If, however, we assume that the 
very brief literature surviving from the early Fathers does 
not quote this Gospel, though it certainly quotes St. 
Matthew’s and St. Luke’s, this has no significance. The 


THE QUESTION OF DATE 13 


writers a little later who do quote St. John quote other 
Gospels far oftener. It is exactly the same with the 
literature and common speech of to-day; and the reason 
is that the occasions when quotations would be to the 
purpose are immensely more frequent in the case of the 
other Gospels. Somewhat similarly, a man who liked 
Antony and Cleopatra best of Shakespeare’s plays would 
very likely not quote it often, but could hardly escape 
quoting Hamlet. The appeal which this Gospel makes 
to people is of a peculiarly intimate nature; emphat- 
ically it belongs to the class of books which people are 
inclined to keep for their private consumption; em- 
phatically also it does not belong to the class of books 
which are handy for the purposes of general instruction. 
It was of course not published as a canonical book; for 
the writers of the New Testament and for their contem- 
poraries the canon of inspired Scripture closed with the 
Book of Malachi: It had to win its way, and its char- 
acter makes it obvious that the interval between the 
writing of it and its widespread recognition as one of the 
most valuable Apostolic writings must have been longer 
than in the case of a book like St. Matthew, of which 
the greatness is so different in kind. | 
Search for this class of definite external evidence 
has led to this: that St. John’s Gospel must have been 
written before 130 and may have been written long 
before that date. Meanwhile, maturer consideration 
has dismissed, as merely fanciful, speculations as to the 
influence upon the doctrine of this book of schools of 
thought which might suggest that it did not belong to 
days of pure Apostolic Christianity. To fix its date 
more closely still we must rely upon the impression which 
it makes upon educated minds familiar with the earliest 
Christian literature, a kind of evidence which concerns 


14 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


its authorship and not its date alone and is bound up 
with the interpretation of the book. It is enough to 
say that here again there exists no reason for doubting 
the general, though unconcerted, agreement of the best 
scholars of our day, which would, roughly speaking, 
give us 110 A.D., or the middle of Trajan’s reign, as the 
latest possible date. 

But it is now worth asking why there is, or was lately, 
a minority which still contends for a much later date. 
I have called them negligible, not because they are few, 
but because their argument on this point appears to me 
wholly without weight. Their contention involves the 
denial that quotations and references to this Gospel 
in writers of the middle of the second century are rightly 
regarded as such. In days when books did not easily 
stay open quotations were generally loose. It may 
often be a question whether a particular sentence shows 
quotation or chance likeness of phrase. In this in- 
stance any unprejudiced reader can sample the argument 
sufficiently by taking the text of Justin Martyr and, with 
it constantly before him, comparing the contention of 
(say) Dr. Stanton, that certain passages are quotations, 
with the contention of Dr. Schmiedl in the Encyclopedia 
Biblica, that they are not. He will certainly conclude 
that the latter is kicking hard against the pricks of con- 
viction in desperate loyalty to alost cause. He may then 
perhaps wonder why the precise year 132 has been selected. 
He will find it is because in that year the unfortunate 
Bar Cochba, who was proclaimed as the Messiah, headed 
the last melancholy insurrection of the Jews against Rome, 
and Dr. Schmiedl tells us that our Lord’s words in St. 
John, v, 43, “If another shall come in his own name, 
him ye will receive,”’ can be nothing but a reference to 
this event. Now this argument passes beyond the 


THE QUESTION OF DATE 16 


bounds within which ordinary human reason operates. 
To the ordinary mind, given the preceding words, ‘“‘I am 
come in my Father’s name, and ye receive me not,” the 
saying that the Jews would welcome later a leader whose 
appeal was of a more earthly sort seems to follow natu- 
rally, as a prophecy which any competent observer of 
affairs then present in Jerusalem might have made. The 
Bar Cochba argument, fortified as it requires to be by 
the rejection of quotations from St. John which occur 
too early, is the only tangible evidence now offered of 
a late date for this Gospel. It is worth notice for two 
reasons: partly because it is an example of a peculiar 
irrational strain, common in minute critics who have lost 
the larger appreciation of what they read; but still more 
because, when clever men can argue so, it shows how 
strong is the lingering hold of a discarded theory about 
the New Testament generally, to which I shall now turn. 
I refer to it not for the sake of slaying the slain again, 
but because I think that we have something to learn from 
its history. 

Under the spell of the tradition which this now obsolete 
theory has left behind it, much critical literature has 
become vitiated by a craving to dissent, with or without 
reason, from whatever older tradition has held. And 
under the same spell a large part of the educated world 
in England is probably inclined to assume that some 
critical theory of the sort called “advanced” has been 
established by research. Ferdinand Christian Baur may 
fairly be described as having made the first important 
attempt to apply modern scientific scholarship to the 
origins of Christian belief, and doubtless, if those of us 
who care to do so can understand the New Testament 
better than did our forefathers, we owe it partly to him. 
He was looking for an explanation which should seem 


16 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


rational, from his point of view, of how the conception 
(venerable to him) of the eternal God made man for man’s 
redemption had come to link itself with the memory 
(also venerable to him) of Jesus of Nazareth. For this 
purpose he framed, in the light of his views as to the 
general course of human thought, a connected and com- 
plete hypothesis of the literary history of the New Tes- 
tament. If views which dissociate St. John’s Gospel and 
its doctrine of the Christ from any personal follower and 
friend of the actual Jesus seem to us plausible, that is, 
with most of us, far more because Baur’s hypothesis 
about the whole New Testament impressed the educated 
world very deeply, than because of any facts which re- 
search has disclosed in regard to this Gospel in particular. 
The bold comprehensiveness of Baur’s theory and the 
elevation of his mind gained for his views in the gener- 
ation preceding our own a prestige, among educated men 
averse to an unthinking orthodoxy, which it is well 
now to remember; for though the present generation 
may generally have forgotten Baur’s name, it has largely 
been brought up with a feeling about the New Testament 
of which he was the chief creator. It was entirely reason- 
able for him to put forward some such hypothesis as he 
did put forward, to be tested by a detailed study of all 
the relevant facts, which has necessarily been the slow 
work of many minds. But that slow work, as it hap- 
pened, destroyed his hypothesis altogether. It has 
continued long since without disclosing good evidence 
for any one of the various later hypotheses which, like 
Baur’s, would displace the older and simpler view of the 
New Testament. Whether the dictum of the New Tes- 
tament be credible or incredible, no educated person ought 
now to imagine that its testimony to our Lord’s teaching 
has in some sense been explained away by research. 


THE QUESTION OF DATE 17 


Baur was inspired by Hegel’s doctrine of the history 
of thought, according to which each new stirring of 
men’s ideas results in a conflict between two opposing 
schools, each founded upon a partial truth, and in an 
eventual harmonizing of the two in the acceptance of a 
completer truth. This doctrine has of course been applied 
in many other fields, and has proved, for instance, 
in the history of Greek philosophy, no less misleading 
as a cast-iron rule than it is upon many occasions il- 
luminating as a hint. The key to the understanding 
of the New Testament lay for Baur in the conflict between 
St. Paul — endeavoring to base a new world-religion 
upon the personality of Jesus Christ — and St. Peter 
and the rest, good Jews to whom Jesus Christ was just 
the Jewish Messiah. ‘This conflict could be seen in full 
swing in certain Epistles of St. Paul, which accordingly 
neither Baur nor anyone since ever doubted. What 
preceded it was obscure to him. All those books of the 
New Testament in which the full acuteness of the con- 
flict could not be seen must, he inferred, be the products 
of a later time, in which reconciliation had set in and 
men were inclined to pretend that there never had been 
conflict at all. It was a natural view enough — in spite 
of some glaring difficulties about it — that the Gospel 
according to St. John, as unfolding in all its fullness the 
central idea of Christianity in language which evoked the 
sympathy of a philosophic mind, required several gen- 
erations of Christian thought to prepare for it. A very 
late date was assigned to it, not in disparagement of its 
historical authority, for Baur thought it did not really 
pretend to that, but in acknowledgment of its spiritual 
greatness. 

It is well to grasp these two facts about our whole 
argument: first, the tendency of critics to deny any close 


18 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


connection between this Gospel and any Apostle has 
from first to last resulted from considerations of general 
principle, such as have been roughly indicated above, 
and not in the least from any actual discovery made by 
patient research. Secondly, the theory upon which this 
Gospel has been so treated involved equally, to the 
powerful mind which conceived it, a relatively late 
dating of most of the other New Testament books. To 
Baur all the uncontentious Epistles of St. Paul, and of 
course both the Epistles of St. Peter, appeared spurious ; 
the Acts was a late work, making believe in relations 
between Paul and the other Apostles which never existed ; 
as to the Synoptic Gospels, curiously enough, St. Mark’s 
seemed to him the latest and most untrustworthy. 

Such, in brief, was Baur’s position. With doubtful - 
and unimportant exceptions, later study has shown him 
to have been mistaken about every book concerned. It 
was soon demonstrated that St. John’s Gospel was in 
use a full score of years before, in Baur’s view, the time 
could have been ripe for it to be written; and more 
recent researches, as we have seen, have pushed the date 
yet further back, so that critics who (if the phrase may be 
used inoffensively) seek to explain the book away, now 
seek this object by other means than impugning its 
antiquity. It has been demonstrated beyond all question 
that St. Mark is the earliest of the Gospels. One after 
another of the Epistles of St. Paul which Baur set aside 
has been recognized by an increasing number of critics 
as genuine; so too has the First Epistle of St. Peter. 
The Acts has come more and more to be acknowledged to 
be what upon the surface it appears. Very definitely, 
then, the theory as a whole falls to the ground. 

It would be going too far afield to dwell here for more 
than a moment on the fallacious observation with 


THE QUESTION OF DATE 19 


which it started. It assumed that between the older 
Apostles and St. Paul — with his deep speculative vision 
and his clear perception that the time had come for 
Christian teaching to aim no longer primarily at con- 
verting Israel first — there was a division more sharp, 
more profound, and more lasting than Paul himself says 
in the very Epistles upon which the theory is based. It 
supposes a Paulinism which Paul indignantly repudiates. 
This Gospel, the accompanying Epistles, the Acts, and 
the First Epistle of St. Peter — which is of considerable 
importance in this connection — were relegated to a 
later period simply because it was assumed that Paul’s 
thought of Jesus Christ stood out of relation to any strain 
of thought of which the leaders of the original Church 
were capable. This assumption does not merely go 
beyond any existing evidence; it goes against indis- 
putable evidence. Paul himself shows no conception 
that he is preaching anything save that very faith of the 
original Christians whom once he had persecuted. 

One result, it must be added, of the whole tendency to 
find late dates for New Testament books has never ex- 
cited so much remark as its marvelous character demands. 
Even in the restricted form in which this tendency now 
survives, it leads scholars to put not only St. John’s 
Gospel and Epistles but the Ephesians, the Pastoral 
Epistles, the First as well as the Second Epistle of St. 
Peter, and that speech to the elders at Miletus (Acts xx, 
18-35), which is among the two or three greatest of 
orations, well on into the second century. A most inter- 
esting consequence follows. We possess several un- 
doubted writings, besides fragments, of the Christian 
literature of the period in question; and, though they 
have their very true merit, none of them are worth read- 
ing now except for purposes of special study. We are 


20 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


asked to believe that the associates of these mediocre 
writers had now and then the happy thought of com- 
posing what (to use a slang term which conveys the 
requisite minimum of censure) we may call “faked” 
books, and that, when they did this, they invariably rose 
to a level above that of their times, and in the majority 
of cases produced what ranks with the greatest literature 
of all time — quod est absurdum. 

The significance of all this is really that the foundation 
upon which a large part of the educated world have based 
their view of Christianity has given way. According 
to a current impression, modern research has shown 
that the central idea which through many centuries has 
in fact animated Christian piety was the: product of a 
generation which had not known Jesus of Nazareth, 
and was connected with Him only by what may be called 
an accident of history, while the actual Jesus is a figure 
mainly lost in the mist of legend. But this impression 
must not be supposed to have been verified by the results 
of learned inquiry. Its original basis has been aban- 
doned and the place of it has certainly not yet been taken 
by any coherent and thought-out view resting on ascer- 
tained facts that can support any similar conclusion. 

I am not here assuming that no such view can ever 
arise. Yet it is surely time that all enlightened and 
emancipated inquirers should make trial of a different 
clue from that which their predecessors have followed. 
Admitting that legends of wonder may have grown up 
more quickly round a revered name than was once rec- 
ognized ; admitting too — what no one ever doubted — 
that “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” 
must have undergone a great development within their 
own stirring lifetimes; may we not suppose, as the real 
clue to the history of the New Testament, that this 


THE QUESTION OF DATE 21 


development was in its essentials completed under the 
still-felt impact of the personality of Jesus Christ? In 
the case of this Gospel, may we not suppose that precisely 
that depth and elevation of thought which Baur took as 
the mark of a later generation resulted from the mature 
comprehension of our Lord by one of those who had 
known Him best on earth? 


Ill 
THE DIRECT EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP 


In approaching the question of whether this Gospel, 
besides being early, comes to us with the authority of an 
Apostle, I shall deal at some length with evidence which 
is rather familiar but of which the real bearing and weight 
seem to me to have been strangely overlooked. Some 
insistence on this point may have the advantage of making 
the early days of Christianity seem a little more real. 

Our earliest information that this Gospel was the work 
of St. John comes from several writers in the close of the 
second century, by which time the Church (the numerous 
local congregations of Christians, acting with felt unity 
and much mutual correspondence and intercourse) had 
almost completed that gradual and informal process by 
which certain treasured books now forming the New Tes- 
tament were set apart from all others, however early, as 
authentic records of the Apostles and their teaching. 
Among these writers were Irenzus, a diligent, experienced, 
much traveled man of practical good feeling and good 
sense; Clement of Alexandria, a man of much learning, 
a singularly interesting author, whose liberality secured 
him in the eighteenth century the distinction of being 
decanonized; and Tertullian, a less attractive person, 
but of marked intellectual and philosophical force. All 
of these men were capable of what now seems strange 


EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP 23 


credulity: Tertullian in Africa believed that in the Im- 
perial Record Office at Rome there were certain “‘ Acts of 
Pilate” which corroborated the Gospels; Clement ap- 
pealed to supposed prophecies of the Sibyl; Irenzus 
buttressed his main contention for a “fourfold Gospel”’ 
with such arguments as that a cherub has four faces — 
which perhaps a very clever man would not have used in 
any age. They are all, none the less, excellent witnesses 
upon matters which the course of their life brought within 
their nearer ken. Of course no one of them knew of his 
own knowledge that a certain man had written a certain 
book a hundred years before, nor should we pay much 
regard to their critical opinions in the ordinary sense of 
criticism; nevertheless, the cause which made these dif- 
ferent men in different parts of the world agree in a 
certain belief about this book is well worth our attention ; 
and hearsay cannot always be dismissed as mere hearsay 
when we know how it came to be heard. 

First, then, it should be noticed that the beliefs of 
Clement and Irenezus about this particular Gospel come 
to us with corroboration. St. John was not a mere name 
to them, as the majority of the Apostles probably were. 
They understood him to have ended his life in Asia, where 
he wrote his Gospel, dying at a great age at Ephesus in 
the reign of Trajan; and each has a characteristic story 
to tell of the old Apostle. Irenzus’ testimony is es- 
pecially striking. His own earlier life was passed in 
Asia, and either as a boy or — as he more likely means — 
in early manhood, he with his companions, to one of 
whom he wrote about it long after, had been accustomed 
to listen to various elders who had known John and other 
Apostles, but above all to Polycarp, whom he remem- 
bered most vividly, recalling with emotion “how he 
would describe his intercourse with John and with the 


24 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


rest who had seen the Lord, and how he would relate their 
words.”’ In corroboration of Irenzus, somewhere about 
190 a.D., Polycrates, who was bishop of Ephesus andthen 
an elderly man, spoke of the “great luminaries” who had 
died in Asia, in a passage which is in some respects puz- 
zling but which clearly means that John the Apostle died 
at Ephesus, and which, though not in so many words 
telling us that he wrote this Gospel, identifies him with the 
disciple who reclined on the Lord’s breast. Of course, if 
all this information were false, the testimony about the 
book would be greatly shaken, and I shall have to return 
later to the contention made that it was false. For the 
moment I will only confess that to me this evidence of 
Irenzus, borne out as it is by Clement of Alexandria and 
Polycrates, seems the sort of evidence which can be dis- 
lodged only by very direct evidence to the contrary. 

But the matter does not rest for us, and did not even 
rest for Ireneus’ mind, uncritical as in some respects he 
may have been, on his personal reminiscences and those of 
one or two others. I[t rests upona widespread tradition, 
the worth of which we must now consider, and as to 
which Irenaeus happens to be very explicit. Apart 
from what he himself had understood from childhood, 
Irenzus received this Gospel as St. John’s and as one of 
four authoritative Gospels, because, together with the 
other Gospels and like other New Testament books, it 
had been similarly received for a long while back in a 
number of churches with which he was acquainted, in 
different parts of the world, in each of which he was sat- 
isfied that there had been from the beginning what he 
thought vitally important for a church, namely, a regu- 
lar succession of church officers whose express business 
it was to guard the tradition of faith received from 
the Apostles. There can be no doubt that this regular 


EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP 25 


succession of ministers did exist; or that the purpose of 
it was to carry on unbroken that function of “bearing 
witness’? which seems to have been regarded by the 
Apostles themselves as their own distinctive function ; 
or that watchfulness as to the kind of books which were 
used in public teaching and as to the authority given to 
these books was a part of the duty of the ministry; or 
that it was into the hands of these constituted ministers 
that written communications to a local church in any 
place came (whether from the first missionaries and 
evangelists of Christianity or, soon after, from other 
local churches), and through their hands that what had 
reached them went on to other churches; or, lastly, that 
by letter and personal visit constant correspondence 
between these congregations was maintained in regard 
to their belief and practice, making the scattered local 
churches one Church, and their traditions one tradition. 

Such was the authority on which Ireneus, who had 
lived successively in Asia, in Rome, and in France, 
accepted this Gospel. Such, without doubt, was the 
authority on which Tertullian in Africa and Clement in 
Alexandria accepted it. Such was the reason why, 
somewhere about the same time, the composer of a doc- 
ument known as the “Muratorian Fragment’ felt en- 
titled to draw up what we may call a canon of the New 
Testament, including all the books of our present New 
‘Testament.except the Revelation. Questions of course 
had been raised about the authority of these books, and 
competing scriptures had been put forward. <A fragment 
preserved from about a generation earlier tells us that 
there were unauthorized scriptures, and that attempts 
were made to tamper with the genuine ones. This frag- 
ment itself proves that there was also vigilance against 
these dangers. Particular schools of Christians, or 


26 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


people on the confines of Christianity, had disputed one 
Gospel or another; one rejected St. John and retained 
the rest; one rejected St. Luke and retained the others, 
including St. John. Those who rejected this Gospel 
appear to have mistaken its teaching hopelessly, and 
been led thereby to an absurd conjecture that it was the 
work of one Cerinthus, of whom more hereafter. We know 
enough about them to warrant the conclusion that they 
impugned it solely because they doubted its doctrine, 
and not because they had any other reason for disputing 
its authenticity. On the other hand, all that we know 
about that main current of early Christian opinion which 
resulted in forming the canon of the New Testament goes 
to suggest not that it selected as authority what squared 
with its doctrine, but that it fashioned its doctrine upon 
what reasonably seemed to be authority. When Clement 
of Alexandria says that orthodox belief is what was 
taught in the Apostles’ days, and that the mark of heresy 
is its comparative novelty, all our surest evidence bears 
him out. The eccentric speculations from which the 
Church turned away, so far as they are known to us, 
were emphatically not descended from what is most 
certainly known to us as Apostolic teaching. The main 
body of Christian people down to Clement’s time, so far 
as we catch glimpses of them, were, for good or for evil, 
not inclined to adventurous speculation. What seem to 
us their extravagances could plausibly plead excuse from 
those passages of undoubted New Testament books which 
we ourselves find it hardest to understand. Nobly, if 
not with intellectual brilliance, we see them striving to 
keep the unity of a great fellowship, based upon the faith 
once delivered to their fathers. These people cannot 
have been careless about their books. Were they stupid 
or silly about them? 


EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP Me 


What has been said shows that the tradition about 
books which was accepted by 200 a.p. was anything but 
that kind of loose tradition which we often associate 
with the word, by which anecdotes and winter-evening 
tales pass down from one generation to another, not 
without a disposition to improve them. Long before 
then it had become an integral part of the tradition con- 
cerning the Christian faith, for the conservation of which 
a strong organization had long existed. Doubtless it 
was not infallible. We must consider a little more closely 
in what respects it affords us very good and in what 
respects it affords us somewhat precarious evidence, and 
must look at such indications as we possess as to whether, 
in regard to what were shortly to become sacred books, 
this tradition was an effective force from the very first. 

The strength and the weakness of our evidence both 
appear from the circumstances in which books of the 
New Testament came into vogue. The reception of any 
writings other than the Old Testament Scriptures as 
having authority came about gradually, with the grad- 
ual passing away of a state of things in which the spoken 
word of the Apostles and their chief associates was the 
one authority for Christian belief. The writings of these 
books, great literature as most of them are, was not the 
work of men who thought of themselves as authors, but 
was incidental to their work of teaching and guiding the 
~ young churches. Those who received the first three Gos- 
pels accepted them as steps taken by accredited teachers 
for the maintenance and improvement of a systematic 
teaching which in its origin had been oral only. Those 
who received the Epistles and who read them out in 
church gatherings, preserved them for further reading on 
occasions and furnished copies of them to other churches, 
accepted them as coming with a certain authority, 


~. _ 


28 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


as a dispatch carries the authority of a Minister who 
may or may not have actually written it. But in either 
case the interest which we now take in the individual 
authorship of the words would first begin to be taken at 
a time when the question of that authorship might have 
become unanswerable — as actually happened in the 
striking instance of the Epistle to the Hebrews. ‘To this 
extent, then, it is reasonable to look out for mistakes in 
tradition; and in fact we may be sure that tradition was 
mistaken in regarding our St. Matthew as earlier than 
St. Mark and in ascribing it, in its present form, to St. 
Matthew. Yet in this very instance we have reason for 
guessing that the mistake was not a wild one; for an 
earlier tradition, preserved by Papias, tells us that St. 
Matthew’s real part in such work was the making of a 
collection of sayings of our Lord, similar to (we may sup- 
pose) if not identical with that which is incorporated 
both in our St. Matthew and in St. Luke, and in the for- 
mer in the more prominent and impressive fashion. In 
any case, the conditions which have thus been described 
make it very unlikely that tradition was wrong when 
it ascribed to a book of importance Apostolic authority in 
a general sense; and it is not very likely that it would 
have linked a particular name with a book if there were 
no real reason for connecting them at all. 

We have no lack of indications that the tradition which 
tried to preserve the Apostles’ teaching was a very liv- 
ing and vigorous thing. It is not, I think, at all fanciful 
to see such an indication in the marked characteristics of 
our first and third Evangelists, who combined a book 
which is substantially our St. Mark with a book of say- 
ings, while each of them added matter from some other 
source. Each has his own individual view of and in- 
terest in his great subject, but they have two points in 


EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP 29 


common. First, each combines in a curious way a con- 
siderable freedom of editing where he chooses with an 
habitually close verbal adherence to the two texts that 
he is incorporating — which is startling when we consider 
the literary power with which each was plentifully en- 
dowed. This points on the one hand to confidence in 
their own knowledge of their subject, and on the other, 
to reluctance in substituting new words for those famil- 
larly taught and learned before. Secondly, while we 
may be almost sure that neither was an original disciple, 
Jesus Christ is not becoming to them (any more than to 
St. Mark, or, one may perhaps add, the writer of the book 
of sayings) a titular and dimly remembered founder of 
their religion, to whose name moral precepts, doctrines, 
and tales of wonder were, as it were, inorganically at- 
tached. Each — by no possible accident — has in his 
own way portrayed a great, living Presence. We may 
believe, if we see cause, that the myth-making ten- 
dency had long played round the remembered person- 
ality; but as it is evident that these authors, in succes- 
sion to others, wrote to give form and permanence to a 
vigorously cherished tradition, so too it is evident that 
the life of that tradition lay in the very real memory of 
a very real being. 

Before a hundred years had gone by, the Church 
generally had definitely formed a list of Christian 
_ writings which, to the exclusion of all others, shared with 
the Old Testament the character of authoritative Scrip- 
ture. But we have glimpses of an intermediate period 
when, though not yet fully invested with this sanctity, 
the books of our New Testament were coming to be dis- 
tinguished, as records of the Apostles’ teaching, from an 
increasing literature of other kinds. Books nearly as old, 
including, along with others of less value, so beautiful 


30 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


a Christian work as the Epistle ascribed to Clement of 
Rome but written in the name of the local church at 
Rome corporately, were preserved and valued, but were 
not given the same rank, because in fact they were not the 
direct record of Apostolic authority. Several Apoc- 
ryphal Gospels found readers, but acquired no authority, 
in spite of their laying false claim to be memoirs of par- 
ticular Apostles. Heretical Gospels were set aside as 
forgeries; this there is no doubt they were. Certainly 
the discrimination thus made between books was hap- 
pily guided. Whatever tests it used, it in fact repelled 
legends of a childish grossness which we know were 
circulated early; and it kept the tone of moral precept 
high, where it might easily have declined toward a 
worldly and uninspiring prudence. ‘‘Demand not back 
that which is your own,” says the uncanonical moralist, 
adding with unquestionable sagacity, “You will not get 
it.’ “Be kind,” he exhorts us, “‘and men will be kind 
to you.” But “that ye may be the children of your 
Father which is in Heaven” is the one motive of canon- 
ical Scripture. 

May we not guess that this tendency to choose the 
best implied a tendency to choose that which came in 
fact from the highest source? Such a guess derives 
strength from this incontrovertible fact that, wherever 
we know the early Church to have rejected a boo 
as (whether good or bad) not Apostolic, it was quite 
obviously right. 

Altogether, it is not a light thing to set aside the tradi- 
tion which had become fixed by the end of the second 
century, in the case of a book like this. Perfectly solid 
evidence, such as convinces us that St. Mark’s is the 
earliest of our four Gospels, may compel us to depart in 
what is after all but a slight degree from that tradition, 


EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP 31 


but in the main its authority is very great. We can in- 
deed picture to ourselves processes by which some slight 
writing might acquire an authority which did not belong 
to it — for instance, through being copied out, to utilize 
valuable space, on a roll where a short authoritative 
writing had first been copied, and being taken by later 
copyists as by the same author. But let us try to rep- 
resent to ourselves plausibly the sort of way in which a 
long and elaborate Gospel first got foisted on one of the 
early churches, and (in the face of an active system of 
teaching which had real authority) came into general 
use, with an authority attaching to it to which it had 
not the smallest claim. I doubt very much whether 
the instances, abundant as they are, of demonstrably 
forged or wrongly ascribed literature supply us with any 
real analogy which will make this process comprehensible 
to us. 

The testimony of a plain and obvious sort given by 
the book itself can be dealt with more briefly, though of 
this it must be said plainly that it is absurd to disregard 
it. J am not here speaking of the direct statement about 
the author in xxi, 24. Whether the postscript which this 
whole chapter constitutes was added immediately after 
a conclusion had been reached in xx or not, and whether 
it was written by the same hand that wrote the Gospel 
or not, — questions which can by no possibility be settled, 
—this particular verse avows itself as an insertion by 
another hand; and whoever inserted it does not unam- 
biguously lay claim to special information about the 
authorship of the Gospel. Different views are possible 
as to this verse, but the one view which it is impossible 
reasonably to hold is the view that qualified witnesses of 
the facts related are here certifying to their truth in a 
sort of attestation clause and omitting to give any force 


32 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


to their attestation by their names or any indication of 
who they are. 

But leaving this isolated verse altogether aside, we 
must recognize that the writer repeatedly lays claim, in 
effect, to possessing peculiar and authoritative means 
of information. Is this an artifice? The question is 
one for common sense to decide upon a broad review of 
the passages concerned as a whole. If it is artifice, it is 
very subtly and thoroughly carried out; not merely by 
the references to the “beloved disciple,’’ and the refer- 
ence in) X1x,135,) 9 her thatysawiit, wi which mayeiete gna 
the same or to another eyewitness; nor merely even by 
the repeated introduction of vivid touches which seem 
to come from eyewitnesses; but also by the ingenious 
affectation of departing from St. Mark in detail, yet (to 
the eye of a critic) with clear reference to him. This 
surely is too crafty a subtlety to be attributed to the 
writer. Surely too the whole procedure here supposed is 
entirely incongruous with the intense earnestness and 
sincerity of conviction upon the whole which are utterly 
unmistakable in this book. Moreover, the book must 
plainly be taken in connection with the first Epistle of 
St. John; and in that Epistle, in which the dramatic 
element and the high degree of conscious art that must 
be recognized in the Gospel are quite absent, it would 
surely be, in the eyes of any practised and intelligent 
reader of books, most absurd to suppose that the writer 
sank from his level of high simplicity to put in the words 
about “that which we have seen”’ for the sake of making 
his letter seem that which it was not. 

The “beloved disciple” may be taken to be the actual 
writer or to be the informant upon whom the writer de- 
pends, but we are certainly intended to take him as one 
or the other. And a little consideration makes it evident 


PVIDBNCE TAS) LO” AURHORSHIP 33 


that we are meant to take him to be the Apostle 
John. 

Let us recall the very plain reason which makes the 
ordinary reader of the New Testament assume that the 
beloved disciple is St. John. This Evangelist deals far 
more readily with individual personalities than do the 
rest. Out of those seven Apostles of whom nothing 
beyond the name and occasionally the trade and family is 
mentioned in the other Gospels or the Acts, four at least, 
Andrew, Philip, Thomas, and Judas not Iscariot (and if, 
as is likely, Nathaniel is Bartholomew, then five) are 
brought in, apparently from a pleasure in speaking of 
them, and with the effect upon the reader of at least 
some acquaintanceship. Judas not Iscariot, of whom the 
mention is slightest, asks in the greatest of all dialogues 
the question which to most of us seems the most inter- 
esting. And Thomas is an instance, beyond all others, 
even in the literature of the Hebrews, of a character made 
teal with a few strokes. “Except ... 1 will not: be- 
lieve.’ “Lord, we know not whither thou goest, and 
how can we know the way?” “Let us also go, that we 
may die with him.’”” Many thousands have made his 
acquaintance gladly, perhaps reflecting, when they think of 
the sentence last quoted, that he and they could find that 
way afterall. Peter, too, has a great deal said about him. 
This being so, it is really startling that from beginning to 
end neither James nor John is named. Nor in the first 
twelve chapters do they ever seem to be alluded to unless, 
as is possible, that other follower of the Baptist who, 
besides Andrew, met with Jesus in John i, 35-40, was 
one of them. But then as the story comes to a climax a 
disciple not named comes persistently upon the scene as 
“the disciple whom Jesus loved.”’ There is also a men- 
tion of a disciple who was known to the high priest, and 


34 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


again of “that man” who “bare record” in John xix, 35. 
Each has been taken to be the beloved disciple, but that 
is not clear; and it seems to be more natural to suppose 
that another man may be indicated — conceivably, of 
course, two men. But the beloved disciple stands out 
clear as, along with Peter, chief of the secondary figures. 
It is flatly impossible to suppose, in view of all this, that 
the Evangelist, writing as he most certainly did with 
St. Mark before him and for readers who knew St. Mark, 
did not intend those readers to identify the beloved 
disciple either with St. James or with St. John. But we 
must observe that St. James died early, whereas this 
disciple is very clearly intended to be taken as having in- 
spired or written this book long afterward; besides 
which, in Chapter xxi he is marked as a man who lived 
long. St. James is thus excluded, and St. John remains. 

We can hardly help wondering why there is no mention 
of St. James. Perhaps there really is. He might be St. 
Andrew’s companion in i, 40; he might also be the 
disciple known to the high priest, who brought in Peter. 
I think that he might be “that man’’ who “knoweth 
that his record is true.”” The term might perhaps be 
used because he had written his testimony, as we use 
the present tense of dead writers; or it might be bad 
Greek; or it might be said of him as not the less living 
though having died; so the child in Wordsworth used 
language. Again, one can imagine that some deeply 
tragic lifelong emotion made it hard for St. John to speak 
of his brother. We do not know. Only, in passing, let 
it be noticed how irrational it would have been for any 
forger, with the skill to introduce those references to St. 
Andrew and the rest, to suppress or seem to suppress any 
mention of St. James. 

Anyway, it would seem impossible to an ordinary man 


EVIDENCE AS TO AUTHORSHIP —3¢ 


to regard the unnamed disciple whom Jesus loved as any 
other than John the Apostle, whose name is so prominent 
in the other Gospels and is significantly omitted here. 
Nevertheless, critics with great reputations attempt to 
show that this disciple was someone quite different, who 
was not one of the Twelve, and whom the other Gospels 
ignore altogether. Incidentally their argument dis- 
credits the tradition that St. John lived to old age in 
Asia, and is to that extent adopted by many who would 
not follow them further. It is therefore necessary to 
consider it a little; and to this remarkable feat of crit- 
icism we will turn in the next chapter. 


IV 
THE “ELDER” AND THE ADVANCED CRITICS 


THERE is commonly supposed to be good authority 
for saying that there died and was buried in Ephesus a 
certain Elder or Presbyter John, who was not the Apostle 
but who, like the Apostle, was an original disciple of our 
Lord. It is suggested, then, that Ireneus and others, 
who were taught by men who had associated with this 
Elder, mistakenly supposed him to have been the Apos- 
tle, whereas, it is urged, the Apostle John never was in 
Ephesus. 

I start with the disadvantage of not believing that the 
elder in question ever existed at all. Belief in him is de- 
rived from Eusebius, who discovers a reference to such a 
person distinct from the Apostle in a passage which he 
quotes from Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, who wrote 
probably between 130 and 140 a.p. Papias, as he tells 
us, with evident justice, was a remarkably stupid man, 
and the passage in question 1s a slightly rambling boast — 
not without a sort of confused eloquence — of the extent 
of his inquiries from or about the older generation, in 
which the name John occurs twice over. When Eusebius 
construes him as referring to two different Johns, I 
believe that, as may happen to a scholar reading the 
words of a less educated man, he has failed to catch his 
drift. But as scholars from St. Jerome to Dr. Stanton 


THE “ELDER” AND THE CRITICS ny 


have followed Eusebius, I ought to assume that I am 
wrong. It should be added that Eusebius guesses that 
the second John wrote the Revelation, while the Apostle 
wrote the Gospel. 

Assuming his existence, it is quite likely in itself that 
this Elder John resided in Asia. On that point Papias 
tells us nothing, but Eusebius conjectures that the Elder 
died at Ephesus, because he had heard it reported that 
two tombs of John were still shown at Ephesus in his own 
time. Here, of course, he implies that the Apostle also 
died at Ephesus, and believes that he wrote the Gospel 
there. 

The next step in the argument is to throw over the 
authority of this last statement of Eusebius as regards 
the Apostle, while retaining as a fact the suggestion taken 
from it that the distinguished Elder died at Ephesus. 

The further steps consist in ransacking the literary 
remains of eight centuries for trifles capable of suggesting 
that the Apostle died earlier, or died elsewhere, but in 
any case not as an old man at Ephesus. 

One argument used for this purpose has become al- 
most famous under the name, “the silence of Ignatius.”’ 
Ignatius, the bishop of Smyrna who was taken to Rome 
to be martyred there in 115 A.pD., or perhaps earlier, wrote 
seven Epistles. ‘These moving letters of an original and 
forceful man were all written at stages of his journey 
‘toward martyrdom, under the high stress of a splendid 
excitement. One of them was written to the Ephesians. 
None of them mention St. John, and scholars have won- 
dered — not so much perhaps at the mere fact, for he 
mentions names of the past very little, as at the absence 
of St. John’s name at a particular point in the letter to 
the Ephesians when he does mention St. Paul. Is this 
really strange? In the first place, I should be inclined 


38 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


to remark that Ignatius’ writing is saturated with rem- 
iniscences of St. Paul’s Epistles; and in the second place, 
that, great as is the space occupied in our minds by the 
work of St. John’s old age, when his residence is said to 
have been chiefly at Ephesus, we know of no reason why 
in those days the thought of Ephesus should have sug- 
gested his name quite so readily as that of Paul, the 
great founder of the Church then in Asia generally. But 
whether this be so or not, Ignatius is certainly full of the 
thought that he is on his way to suffer for Christ in Rome, 
where, as he certainly reflected, Peter and Paul had suf- 
fered before him. This being so, consider the three 
passages where alone he does name any Apostle. In 
one, which need only be mentioned for the sake of com- 
pleteness, he speaks of his knowledge that the risen 
Christ is in the flesh, and of how our Lord “came to those 
with ‘Peter and: said, > Take, touch “me,.and ‘see... aan 
a second, which we must note, he ts writing to the Romans 
to whom he is coming, and refers humbly to how Peter 
and Paul had previously come to them with the like fate 
impending. In the remaining passage, which has occa- 
sioned such surprise, he tells the Christians of Ephesus, 
through whose city he will pass to martyrdom, that they 
are ‘“‘the halting place on the road of those who are being 
taken up to God,”’ and proceeds: ‘‘ You are sharers in 
mysteries with Paul, the hallowed, the martyred, the 
worthily blessed, upon whose tracks may I be found when 
I meet God.” He was very literally upon St. Paul’s 
tracks. Now, indeed, in our familiar letters or in those 
which we write under emotion, some concealed association 
of ideas often makes us mention one name and omit, 
without any significance in the omission, some other 
name which might seem as proper for mention, but 
here the association of ideas which causes one name and» 


Mee eh DERG AND) THE ORTLICS 39 


no other to be mentioned is staringly visible. Scholars 
have naturally looked to see whether there was anything 
about St. Johnin Ignatius. ‘The accident that there is no 
mention of him is nothing. 

In choosing several further specimens of these alleged 
pieces of evidence I am making a fair choice, for, except 
that I avoid those which it would take ay yae to state, I 
am choosing quite at random. I must add that all the 
arguments of which I am about to complain are taken 
from scholars of high repute, of deserved reputation. I 
begin with some of the arguments relied upon by Arch- 
deacon Charles in his most interesting commentary on 
the Revelation. 

A writer of the tenth century A.D., picturesquely called 
George the Sinner, said that Penis (the early Father 

“with exceedingly little mind’’) had stated that St. John 
was killed by the Jews. It is also probable — not 
certain — that an untrustworthy writer of the fifth cen- 
tury had attributed the same statement to Papias. It 
is really doubtful whether Papias ever did make this 
statement, which both Eusebius, who makes full use of 
him, and Ireneus would have been likely to repeat 
ienemdidy isakerit. Let us'assume that he did.) Dr. 
Charles, assuming further that he was right, thinks it 
proves that St. John died before the destruction of Jeru- 
salem, because after that no Jewish authority had law- 
ful power to put anyone to death. But did the dispersed 
Jews, often a most turbulent people, cease altogether 
after that date to kill people unlawfully? We know 
that both before and afterward they did murder or 
massacre many thousands. Again, did not Christians 
often, as in the case of our Lord (“whom ye slew’’), 
speak of a person as killed “by the Jews”? when the Jews 
had instigated the official Roman persecutors against 


40 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


him, as it is probable that they often did? And lastly, 
may not Papias, whose unlovable credulity blended 
traditions of some worth with chatter that was silly and 
obscene, have accepted uncritically, thirty years after 
the event, just that sort of baseless legend which most 
of ourselves have heard gravely repeated about the 
death of Lord Kitchener? ‘This evidence, too, is nothing. 

Very likely St. John was killed; the well-known de- 
tailed stories about his death belong to pure legend; 
but, by the way, Dr. Charles does not prove it by pointing 
to our Lord’s words to the two sons of Zebedee, “‘ Ye 
shall indeed drink of the cup that I drink of.””. Naturally 
and properly, ecclesiastical thought has since associated 
this phrase with those many who have faced death liter- 
ally for Christ’s name, and have spoken of the “cup of 
martyrdom.” But it would be jarring, if it were not 
a merely careless anachronism, thus to limit the meaning 
of our Lord’s words. Surely, in the Lord’s own thought, 
His cup could be drunk, His baptism received, His cross 
borne, without the assistance of the executioner. But 
very likely St. John was killed. The question is whether 
he was killed early. And Dr. Charles’s chief reason for 
thinking that he was, seems to be that he reads Clement 
of Alexandria as stating that all the Apostles were dead 
before the death of Nero. Now in the passage in question 
Clement of Alexandria is insisting that the heresies are of 
late and the faith of early growth. The heresies in ques- 
tion began, he says, in the time of Trajan, but the “teach- 
ing’ of our Lord ‘“‘ran to its close” or “completed 
itself’’ (the Greek word is not exactly translatable; it is 
sometimes used of death, as in “he finished his course,”’ 
but is here used not about the end of anybody’s life. but 
about the completion of a mission) in the reigns of Augus- 
tus and Tiberius, and “the teaching of the Apostles”’ did 


iter DE DER ANDO VEE GS CRETICS 41 


so in those of Claudius and Nero. He is making his 
point with some rhetorical exaggeration, for he clearly 
speaks in the context as if our Lord had been teaching 
under Augustus — that is, before 14 a.p. There is no 
doubt a corresponding looseness in what he says of the 
Apostles’ “‘teaching”’ if we believe, as I do, that long 
after Nero’s time there was living, necessarily in com- 
parative seclusion, an aged Apostle whose teaching sig- 
nified much to a good few people then, and in a literary 
form has signified immensely to after times. But in a 
broad sense the teaching mission of the Apostolate had 
run to its fulfillment. ‘The great initial work of founding 
churches throughout the Eastern Empire, in the capital 
of the world, and perhaps as far west as Spain, was done. 
The whole foundation of the faith had, as Clement un- 
questionably thought, been well and truly laid when, 
about 65 a.p., Peter and Paul died at Rome under Nero. 
Even then, if this were all that Clement of Alexandria 
had to tell us, we could not safely read him as saying 
that none of the Apostles survived Nero. As a matter 
of fact, startling as it would be to anyone who first learned 
it after reading this argument of Dr. Charles, this same 
Clement proceeds a little later in the same work to give 
us the most interesting information which we possess 
about St. John’s life in Asia long afterward. 

Dr. Charles has another ground, besides St. John’s 
alleged early death, for thinking that he never went to 
Asia. ‘There is somewhere a statement that the Apostles 
at some period had agreed to carry their preaching in 
different directions and that while some did go to the 
Province of Asia, St. John went far East. So he can 
never have gone to Asia! This is exactly and precisely 
as if some historian hereafter should reject a tradition 
that Lord Bryce was well acquainted with America upon 


42 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


learning that after a distinguished early career at Oxford 
he went to Mount Ararat. 

I turn to a recent book on this Gospel by Professor 
Burney of Oxford. His main contention, of which I 
will not attempt to judge, is that it shows signs of having 
been originally composed in Aramaic. If it was, he 
remarks, it cannot have been written in Asia. Why 
should not its necessarily long composition have begun 
before the writer settled in Asia; or why should he not 
have written Aramaic in Ephesus as easily as modern 
Jews write Yiddish in London? But this learned author 
has made a further discovery. Irenzus, he argues, meant 
always by “John,” not the Apostle, but the famous 
Elder, for while he always speaks of Paul as the Apostle, 
and once or twice applies that term to others, in his 
many references to John, he more often calls him the 
Disciple of our Lord. Now, if he actually called John 
the Disciple all through there would be nothing surpris- 
ing in it; the name Apostle or Missionary was not used 
from the start as a sort of title exclusively belonging to 
thirteen persons and as the only proper designation of 
any one of them. It is not used in St. John’s Gospel 
at all. The word then constantly used, “disciple,” has 
now and must have had for Ireneus a peculiar appropri- 
ateness to the disciple whom Jesus loved. As against 
St. Paul, who was an Apostle, it was the distinction of 
St. John that he was a Disciple in a sense in which St. 
Paul was not. But if this usage of Ireneus had been 
in ever so much need of explanation, no conceivable 
number of passages in which he had spoken of St. John 
under any designation whatsoever could by any rational 
process be made to count against the single passage — 
there are parallel passages—in which, as a matter 
of fact, he speaks of St. John expressly as the Apostle, 


PHY MELDER]? AND ‘THES GRITICS 243 


and with express reference to him as the writer of this 
Gospel. 

Probably few students of such matters who learn that 
some great authority has reached certain conclusions 
realize that great authorities are given to reasoning of 
this kind. 

I will take a last example of it from the great Dr. Julius 
Wellhausen, whose work on the Mosaic books is well- 
nigh a work of genius, but who in later years has applied 
himself to St. John. He, like Dr. Charles, thinks that 
John the son of Zebedee died rather early, and thinks 
further that John perished with his brother James. 
St. Luke in the Acts, having mentioned St. John a little 
before, relates how Herod “killed James the brother of 
John with the sword,” quite certainly implying that 
John survived. Dr. Wellhausen “cannot help suspecting 
that Luke has here suppressed some names.” St. Luke 
was an eminently picturesque writer, and it 1s impossible 
to imagine the (necessarily discreditable) motive which 
should make him suppress what would have made an 
impressive end to his several impressive references to St. 
John as second among the Apostles. This is an amazing 
piece of suspiciousness; and the authority upon which 
St. Luke is overridden is more amazing still. There is 
indeed an extant statement or suggestion (one only) that 
the two sons of Zebedee were killed together. It is not 
the supposed statement of Papias, which has been men- 
tioned ; it is an inference from that supposed statement, 
frankly put forward as a mere inference, by Georgius 
Hamartolus eight hundred years later. 

There could be no better example of a vice which 
microscopic research seems often to induce, that of ab- 
normal suspiciousness toward the evidence which suf- 
fices ordinary people, coupled with abnormal credulity 


44. ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


toward evidence which is trifling or null. And the whole 
mass of evidence against St. John’s residence in Asia 1s 
null. This is not one of those many instances in which 
indications separately slight collectively amount to an 
impressive or conclusive argument. Every one of these 
pieces of evidence by itself must be evaluated at nothing. 
And nothing may be added to nothing forever and ever, 
but the sum will still be nothing. 

The critics who indulge in arguments such as these 
are ignoring all the while the plainest fact in the whole 
problem, namely, the reference in this Gospel to a certain 
disciple who, if we attend at all to the Gospels, can be 
none but the Apostle John, the son of Zebedee. The 
advocates of the theory which is supported in this manner 
include a number of men of the very highest reputation 
among the New Testament scholars who are reckoned 
to be “‘advanced.’’ Moreover, it would be easy to find 
among the writings of such scholars other, equally aston- 
ishing examples of the same kind of work. It is unfor- 
tunately plain that a large class of those New Testament 
critics who may be supposed without offense to aim at 
being enlightened and up to date, condone on the part of 
themselves and their colleagues work such as would 
gravely discredit a man occupied in other branches of 
literary or historical study or in any of the physical 
sciences. This must not of course prejudice our exam- 
ination of any important view, seriously maintained, with 
which we may meet later; but I confess it emboldens 
me to pursue my own line of inquiry without troubling 
much beforehand as to what critical theory can at the 
moment cite the most imposing list of recent authorities 
in its favor. 

We have been considering evidence which, outside 
the ranks of theology, no reasonable man would dream 


THE EEDER”™ ANDOVTHEY CRITICS 45 


of setting aside except for very substantial and well- 
tested reasons. We must ask later whether that evidence 
warrants us in saying that St. John actually wrote this 
Gospel; but it certainly points to the conclusion that the 
book bears his authority in some quite real way. The 
discussion which follows, as to the character and histor- 
ical worth of the book and the relation of its doctrine 
to that of other books in the New Testament, is bound 
incidentally to test that conclusion thoroughly. 


V 
THE MAN, SAINT JOHN 


Tuis conclusion takes us a great deal further than the 
mere assurance that the book has Apostolic teaching at 
the back of it in a general way. ‘The individual Apostle 
with whom it connects this Gospel stood in a relation of 
special intimacy with Jesus Christ, and held later a 
marked position of his own in the infant Church; and he 
was a man whose individual character is by no means 
entirely vague to us. It will be well here to set down in 
order all these few things about John the son of Zebedee 
that we can gather from authorities which vary in weight 
but are in no case negligible — mere legends need not be 
noticed. I cannot, however, proceed with this piece of 
construction without first pausing to distinguish the two 
very different ways in which, in two different senses 
of the word “conjecture,” fragments of information 
may be “conjecturally”’ pieced together. Are the frag- 
ments large or small? Do they together amount to the 
whole image or nearly so, or leave much to be supplied 
according to fancy? Are they certainly parts of one and 
the same image? Must they certainly be connected in 
this way, or can we imagine an indefinite number of other 
possible connections between them ? Commentators often 
make guesses, quite worth entertaining for a while, to see 
if confirmation can be found for them, and then, because 


THE MAN, SAINT JOHN 47 


they are the first guesses which have occurred to them, 
treat the guesses — quite illegitimately — as on that 
account probably true. ‘There is a good instance in the 
case’of St. Paul. He had, we know, “a thorn in the 
flesh, the messenger of Satan sent to buffet”? him, which 
he mentions for a purpose, without giving those details 
of his symptoms to which a weaker man would have 
treated us. He had also the “gift of tongues,”’ a matter 
which, if it were more important to us than it is, would 
perhaps be the greatest puzzle in the New Testament. 
Then there was the great vision on the road to Damas- 
cus, mysterious indeed, and exciting a more profitable 
wonder. On the strength of this we are told that he was 
subject to fits or seizures, of a species for which the com- 
mentator supplies a name from an obscure branch of 
medicine; we are asked somehow to associate the vision 
with this; ultimately that brilliant and lovable but 
supremely credulous psychologist, Dr. William James, 
in his Varieties of Religious Experience, uses the (sup- 
posed) mentally defective genius of St. Paul to illustrate 
a sort of gospel of neurotic holiness. Now I am not 
concerned with the study of St. Paul, and still less with 
the relations which may or may not exist between mental 
instability and mental strength. The point here is this: 
the disease which St. Paul found so trying may have been 
any one of a great number; of speaking with tongues we 
know nothing ; it was certainly no messenger of Satan that 
met Paul on the road to Damascus. Here then are iso- 
lated phenomena, of which one may say that they may 
be related in the way which we fancy, but must add that 
they may be equally well related in an indefinite num- 
ber of other ways, and that they may be as irrele- 
vant, each to the others, as a man’s height is to his bank . 
balance. 


48 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


It is far otherwise with the scattered notices of St. 
John which I now approach. They may take few words 
in the telling, but in more than one case a large part of 
the man went into the doing or saying of them. They 
show us marked traits of his character or marked features 
of the effect which he made. They must be closely 
related in some way. In more than one way they 
present contrasts, which challenge remark, between qual- 
ities which we may not often associate together; but 
instinctively and without searching for a theory we can 
see them on the whole cohering together in a kind of 
character exceptional, but to none of us quite unfamiliar. 
We might describe the figure thus presented to us rather 
differently according to our individual sympathies and 
the degrees of our clumsiness in character drawing (and 
we need not venture on elaborate portraiture) ; but we 
should mean much the same thing; and the sort of 
figure which we should all have in mind represents the 
only way in which the data before us can be associated 
together. 

To begin then with the first three Gospels: James and 
John, generally mentioned in that order, were the sons 
of Zebedee, a Galilean fisherman substantial enough to 
employ other men. Galilee, it may be noted, seems to 
have been a country in which there prevailed much in- 
dustrious independence; a reasonable degree of social 
equality; a good deal of keen interest in religion, per- 
haps “unlearned and ignorant” from the point of view 
of a Pharisee in Jerusalem; where also a good deal of 
contact with diverse kinds of people might be had. 
Thus — in spite of a curiously narrow remark of Matthew 
Arnold’s — boyhood in Galilee was not a specially un- 
promising origin for a literary genius; nor surely is boy- 
hood as a fisherman. ‘Two other fishermen, Andrew 


THE MAN, SAINT JOHN 49 


and his brother Simon Peter, were, according to St. Luke, 
their close neighbors. These were the first men that our 
Lord called to be His nearer followers. Andrew, says 
this Gospel, was the first and brought Peter to our Lord. 
“And when he had gone a little further thence, he saw 
James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who 
also were in the ship mending their nets. And straight- 
way he called them: and they left their father Zebedee 
in the ship with the hired servants, and went after him.” 
The abruptness of the call and of the departure, as St. 
Mark thus relates them, are probably, in the full sense 
of both words, poetic truth. St. Luke perhaps softens 
away the abruptness too much by the incidents which 
he places before the calling. It may well be that the 
real link with dryer facts is supplied in the Fourth Gos- 
pel, where, though James and John are not mentioned, 
Andrew’s following of our Lord is associated with the 
' Baptist’s teaching. However that may be, from their 
first calling onward James and John are, after Peter, 
preéminent among the disciples. It should be noticed 
at once that they are equally the only individual Apos- 
tles in the Acts. The references to James and John, 
generally but not always together, sometimes with Peter 
and sometimes not, are not casual but significant. 

_ Passing over an incident when apparently there are 
still but four close followers of our Lord, we may start 
with the calling of the Twelve and their dispatch upon 
a trial mission. Here our Lord has already His own sur- 
name for James and John; they are the Sons of Thunder, 
an allusion not, as in facetious quotations, to a bellowing 
kind of eloquence, but to some deeper quality of char- 
acter. Some time after this choosing of the Twelve 
comes a miracle of healing when “he suffered no man to 
follow him [into the house] save Peter, and James, and 


50 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


John.” Next, these two and Peter are again His sole 
companions upon the Mountain of Transfiguration. 
After this it was John who said, “Master, we saw one 
casting out devils in thy name . . . and we forbade him 
because he followeth not us,”’ and St. Luke adds, a few 
verses later, how James and John wanted to call down. 
fire from heaven upon the inhospitable Samaritan village. 
We know the answer in the former case, and how in the 
latter Jesus rebuked them, adding, according to many 
ancient manuscripts, which must have got the saying 
from somewhere, “Ye know not what manner of spirit 
youre OL 

Next comes a brief incident so intensely characteristic 
of Jesus Christ’s dealing with men, as the Gospels show 
it, that to dwell on each point of it is more than allow- 
able; it is a duty for every reader and incidentally for 
the critical historian. They were “in the way, going up 
to Jerusalem”; Jesus, St. Mark tells us, walked alone 
before them, and already they (the whole company) 
were “amazed”? and some were “‘afraid.’’ Then Jesus 
took the Twelve into His company again. He had al- 
ready foretold to them His Passion; He warned them 
plainly that He was going to it now. It was while this 
warning was fresh in their ears that the mother of the 
sons of Zebedee brought her sons to Him to ask a favor: 
“that these my two sons may sit, the one on thy right 
hand and the other on thy left hand, in thy kingdom.” 
St. Mark, it should be said, omits the mother, so that 
every reader’s sympathy goes wholly with the ten, who 
were “much displeased with James and John.” It is 
surely an instance, and not the only one, of our first 
Evangelist’s fuller grasp, that he brings the mother into 
the scene, thus changing this piece of forward thrusting 
into a touching and slightly humorous incident — Poor 


THE MAN, SAINT JOHN SI 


mother! poor young men! poor Zebedee! In any case, 
however, the demand of a special reward was rather the 
prompt volunteering of a service. They knew, if their 
mother did not, what lay before Him and perhaps them. 
It may not be an over-refinement to suggest that those 
who at that moment made that request showed a quicker 
and a deeper comprehension than had the other disciples 
of how He conceived of His kingdom, or as St. Mark puts 
it, of His “glory.”” The seeming vanity, like Nelson’s 
with his “Victory or Westminster Abbey,’’ was mainly 
a veiled self-devotion. Not wholly; there was real 
vanity or thrusting. We may recall how He met them. 
They are taken very seriously and quite kindly. What 
they are to go through for Him is put firmly; they will 
not flinch from it. Any assurance as to their reward is 
gently withheld. There is yet no sign of the rebuke, 
which will come as it had come on the last occasion. 
Everybody who has been young knows what a lasting 
wound the deserved check, if given without an interval, 
would have inflicted. And so the rebuke is held up till 
it gets the whole Twelve at once, and James and John 
can appropriate their own portion of it for themselves. 

What remains needs few words in telling, but none 
the less it means much. After that Supper not much 
later, which — St. Luke tells— John had been sent with 
Peter to prepare, Peter, James, and John are again, for 
one last time, alone together with our Lord as His chosen 
three, the nearest to Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. 
We remember how the pitiless sleep of exhaustion fell 
upon them, and brought upon them one last justly quali- 
fied rebuke. We are to reflect what it must have meant 
- about a man that Jesus Christ liked to feel him near in 
that hour. 

When we pass to the Fourth Gospel, we gather that 


ye ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Peter and John were on either side of our Lord, John 
leaning against Him, at that Supper which according to 
Luke they had prepared; that John knew himself to be 
specially dear to our Lord; that, at Peter’s hint, he could 
at the moment when our Lord was greatly troubled ask 
a question which others could not ask; that (apparently) — 
through the rest of the great dialogue he was a silent 
listener; that from the Cross our Lord committed His 
mother to John’s care; that thenceforward she lived at 
John’s home; that at the rumor of the resurrection he 
ran faster than Peter to the sepulchre, and long years 
after recalled his speed with pleasure; and that at the 
door of the sepulchre some shy feeling held him standing, 
while the slower Peter came up and went in. If we take, 
as is natural, Chapter xxi to contain reminiscences of 
his, we obtain further our Lord’s mysterious words about 
his tarrying, and we notice the keenness with which Peter 
asks about John’s future, and see again the loving interest 
with which John’s reminiscences dwell upon Peter himself. 

In the early chapters of the Acts, describing the first 
prosperous start of the Church in Jerusalem, we accord- 
ingly find these two closely conjoined. James is no 
longer seen, but John appears as the usually silent asso- 
ciate whom nevertheless Peter chooses to have with him, 
and whose presence is clearly felt. Yet his boldness is 
marked as well as Peter’s. To St. Luke, by the way, as 
well as to the Sanhedrim, he is an “unlearned and ig- 
norant”’ man, whose well-grounded assurance seems a 
marvel, and on the one occasion on which he appears to 
speak it is, along with Peter, in firm defiance of the San- 
hedrim. ‘Thus St. Luke in Acts iii and iv has set John 
in the foreground of the picture, which for the moment 
employs his descriptive power, of those early and so to 
speak intimate days of the Church, and therewith, except 


THE MAN, SAINT JOHN 53 


for the briefest notice later, he has done with him. Shortly 
after, the historian begins to deal with the succession 
of events by which this little company of closely asso- 
ciated Jews in Jerusalem passes into a Church which is 
to leaven the Empire and the world. 

It is by his grasp of the main stages in that great 
development that St. Luke has won credit as a great and 
true historian. Vividly as he can narrate such minor in- 
cidents as may attract him, yet till we come to the jour- 
neys in which he himself took part he is careless of 
completeness — and probably of accuracy — about much 
that would interest us now, and he has no further use for 
St. John in his story, except just this: that in Acts viii, 
when the Church has spread to Samaria, John is sent down 
with Peter on behalf of the Apostles, to confirm in the 
faith these people on one of whose villages he had some 
years before been wishing to call down fire. Later, when 
Herod has “put forth his hands to afflict certain of the 
Church,” and kills James the brother of John— never 
elsewhere appearing in the Acts, but presumably, from 
his fate, held important — and throws Peter into the 
prison from which he is so soon to be delivered, John 
does not appear. Very likely he was absent from Jeru- 
salem upon some such errand as that to Samaria. Very 
likely he was not. All we know is that, immediately 
after the death of John’s brother, it is not John but an- 
other James, the brother of our Lord, who to St. Luke 
has become the next most important figure to Peter in 
the Church at Jerusalem — indeed, so far as Jerusalem 
is concerned, more important than Peter. Not long 
after comes the great crisis at which the Apostles and the 
whole Church in Jerusalem have to determine their at- 
titude toward Gentile converts and toward the work of 
Paul and Barnabas. In the public assembly whose 


4 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


proceedings St. Luke relates, Peter speaks, then Bar- 
nabas and Paul, finally and decisively this other James. 

Of course, as has just been said, Luke’s account of things 
has not the real completeness which his splendid power of 
narration may make it seem to have; but we may cer- 
tainly infer one thing from his silence about St. John 
here, and that whether we assume his story of the council 
to be strictly historical or not: St. Luke knew nothing 
which could cause him to represent St. John as playing 
a publicly and overtly decisive part in the great develop- 
ment of that time. On the other hand, it seems prob- 
able that St. Luke has placed St. John where he placed 
him in earlier chapters because his was a personality that 
somehow counted, somehow made itself felt at that time, 
and continued afterward to do so. 

That St. John who thus vanishes from the Acts — 
whether to reappear or not in a never-written concluding 
part of that history we cannot tell— was still a felt 
person, we know for a fact when we turn to St. Paul’s 
account, in Galatians, of that crisis at Jerusalem. It is 
not of the great council of the Christians in Jerusalem, 
which doubtless did happen, that Paul has a word to say. 
What rather interested him was the private conferences 
with great individuals which preceded it and determined 
the issue. These great individuals were: James (not 
the brother of John), named first because, as appears 
immediately after, it was he whom Paul’s opponents 
claimed as their head; Cephas or Peter; and John. We 
find here that John was one of the three exclusively spoken 
of as they “who seemed to be pillars” (the Greek word 
for “seemed” does not in itself carry any such suggestion 
of mere seeming, as does our word); that, with the 
others, his mission was yet to lie among Jews alone; 
that none the less he, with the others, gave the right hand 


THE MAN, SAINT JOHN 5s 


of fellowship to Paul and Barnabas as they went to the 
Gentiles. 

After very many years the same John came again 
within the light of historical evidence now remaining. 
All the circumstances which caused the great controversy 
in Jerusalem had vanished. Peter and Paul in Rome had 
about the same time met their death. Jerusalem had 
been destroyed, and John sojourned far away in Asia, 
among those churches which Paul had founded. We can 
say with fair assurance that he passed times of retirement, 
in the little island of Patmos or elsewhere, as a dreamer 
of dreams and a seer of visions. We can say with absolute 
certainty that his main work was, even if not that of a 
writer, yet that of the quiet teacher of a doctrine rooted 
‘in a glowing memory of the past and marked by a vast 
comprehensiveness and intense concentration of reflec- 
tive power. This was the hot-headed youth of whom 
we read in the Synoptic Gospels. 

I have no hesitation in recalling here, with serious 
purpose, the two stories of very unequal worth known to 
us, which attached to the memory of this old man some 
two generations later. Ireneus, with his vivid memory 
of how John’s young associates talked of him when they 
themselves were old, connects his teaching in Ephesus 
with opposition to one Cerinthus, whose (alleged) strange 
way of honoring the name of Jesus Christ, while depriving 
it of real significance, must be noticed further on. Once, 
Ireneus declares, John went into a public bath with his 
followers; when he found that Cerinthus was there he 
rushed out, excitedly calling to his friends that the roof 
_ would fall in on them if they stayed under it with Cerin- 
thus. We need not have the slightest trouble in dis- 
believing this unpleasant yarn; for it is certain that the 
young disciple whom Jesus loved grew dignified when he 


56 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


was old. But the story is of the type which Oxford and 
(presumably) Cambridge love to tell of their revered 
instructors, more often than not with a real affection for 
them. It deserves to be regarded as a lie, but it deserves 
to be regarded as the particular sort of lie that people tell 
about that sort of man. Manifestly this story was never 
told of an old man whose fiery vehemence had been quite 
tamed. Clement of Alexandria, on the other hand, tells 
a story which must be regarded in a different light. It 
should be read in the original. If it is not substantially 
fact, as is quite possible, then it is an example of the 
romance which is really sympathetic. Somewhere in 
his peregrinations among the churches of Asia, St. John 
made a convert of a boy whose promise specially appealed 
to him. He placed him for education as a Christian with 
the elders of the Church in a city which he did not revisit 
for some years. When he did return he at once asked 
for him, and the elders told him with long faces that he 
had departed from them and was actually the chief of a 
formidable band of brigands in the neighboring mountains. 
John’s indignation with the elders was great. He told 
them it was entirely the fault of their own inefficient and 
unloving handling of their charge. Then the old man 
set out on foot for the mountains, quite alone. He was 
captured, as he had intended, by an outpost of the brig- 
ands, and demanded to be led before their chief. He 
threw his arms round the dreaded marauder and with 
little persuasion brought him back into the Christian 
fold. 

To sum up: It matters little whether in this long mar- 
shaling of facts about St. John my own commentary is in 
any part clumsy; the degree of interest attaching to any 
part of the story and the precise sentiment or absence 
thereof with which we regard it are matters to be left to 


ere WEIN SS ACLING rN oy, 


each individual reader of the New Testament. But for 
a critical or historical purpose which cannot be altogether 
neglected some definite characteristics of this man’s life 
and character are of importance, and these are really 
matters of fact as certain and as clear-cut as, say, that 
Canada is cold in winter or India hot in summer. The 
peculiarly dear friendship which the Master felt for him 
is certain. Hardly less certain, and for our purpose not 
much less significant, are the affection and reliance on 
him of Peter —a great man, when the work which he 
accomplished is once clearly seen. Such friendship is not 
given to a man whose capacity for devoted loyalty can 
be doubted; hardly to a man whose nature is not richly 
sympathetic. In his youth there chiefly stand out the 
blended fierceness and tenderness of his character, the 
former the more conspicuous 1n his own recorded conduct, 
the latter plainly shown by the feeling of others for him. 
That in varying and subtle ways these qualities, each in 
high degree, do mingle in many people most interesting 
to us needs no saying, nor that in crude youth they con- 
trast strangely. But character, of course, can only be 
properly viewed as a thing which grows, nor does that of 
-a man who has lived any length of time excite strong 
personal feeling in us if we have no inkling that his days 
were “bound each to each by natural piety.’’ This in 
St. John’s case we see clearly. There is indeed an inter- 
vening period, covering what can commonly be called a 
man’s best years, in which we learn of him only that, bold 
though he might be, others outshone him quite on the 
more public side of an Apostle’s activities, yet that 
he remained indefinably a notable man, who “‘seemed to 
be a pillar.” Looking back and looking forward, we 
might infer that already he had begun to take a deter- 
mined bent toward the field which his calling offered, of 


58 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


deep meditation and speculation, and this without loss of 
the inward fire and energy of his nature or that which 
had given him his marked hold on live individuals in close 
contact with him. That he had taken this turn already 
is only inference. That eventually he took it, we know 
for certain. And in this he presents again a contrast of 
qualities, those of the philosopher and of a very warm- 
blooded man, which we do not quite so easily reconcile 
as the former contrast. We do not do so because in fact 
the philosophical temperament, as distinct from simple 
studiousness that happens to be turned to certain sub- 
jects, is extremely rare. Yet there are rare individuals 
in every generation, for whom “voyaging through strange 
seas of thought alone”’ becomes an object of manly pas- 
sion, not detaching them from the interests of their kind, 
much less detaching them from friends, and not quench- 
ing in them a certain volcanic quality that breaks out in 
swift and stern decision now and then. 

To this rare and fascinating type it is unquestionable 
that St. John belonged. And this brings us to the salient 
feature of his life. Whether it be that his powers did not 
come to full fruition till an age at which the vital fires of 
most men have begun to burn lower; or whether it be 
that the opportunity ordained for him arose for this 
Apostle only when, in Clement’s sense, the ministry of the 
Apostles had run its course; or whether, as is far more 
likely, these causes were conjoined; the fact is certain. 
The work by which the world since has known him was 
engendered by an old man. An old man, still to be rec- 
ognized as the beloved young Son of Thunder. 


Who would not give, 
If so he might, to duty and to truth 
The eagerness of infantine desire? 


THE MAN, SAINT JOHN 59 


And lastly, I would point in this connection to one part 
of the writings which bear St. John’s name, the First 
Epistle, with its two charming but slighter companions. 
I will not forestall my study of his Gospel nor — for 
another reason, that of fear — venture yet any remark 
on the Revelation. The First Epistle is one of those 
writings in which surely the writer’s being seems to ex- 
press itself; in that respect some other Epistles in the New 
Testament, notably II Corinthians and Philippians, are 
its equals, but no book in the world excels it. Anyone 
who reads it sympathetically must have the sense of 
knowing the man that wrote it, and the man that he 
sees there is the same that he will see in the fragmentary 
story of St. John’s life. 

I leave this matter here, not intending to protract my 
study of the Gospel by seeking verification of what I 
have said. I have dealt with it, first, because some 
reasonable preconception as to the person who, if he did 
not actually compose the book, must be taken to have 
influenced the writer chiefly, may throw a general light 
upon the book; secondly, because here at least is one 
point in which St. John enlarges our knowledge of the 
historic Jesus: we know the sort of man to whom our 
Lord’s human liking turned. 


Ni 
SOME LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BOOK 


I sHALL now set down some observations upon the 
characteristics of the Gospel according to St. John as a 
literary composition. All of these observations, though I 
shall elaborate some of them, are, I think, in their main 
substance such as would occur to any man who had read 
and enjoyed a considerable variety of great literature, 
who had not for long read this Gospel straight through, 
who sat down to do so with a fresh mind and — so far as 
possible — as he would read any other good book. 

First, it goes without saying that this is a very different 
Gospel from any of the others. Each of those others 
aims at giving an answer, short enough, comprehensive 
enough, and therefore fragmentary in a way and free 
from discussion, to the questions: Who was our Master 
—or your Master — Jesus Christ? What did He do? 
What did He teach? This writer’s purpose is very dif- 
ferent. Passing over a very great deal which in those 
answers bulked large, he means to insist upon and to illus- 
trate one element in them which he thinks supremely 
important, and which he feels is in danger of being neg- 
lected or denied. He makes this intention clear at the 
very start, and not in one chapter, hardly in one verse, 
does he loosen his hold of it. This might go without 
saying, but it has important consequences which have 
perhaps been too little considered. 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 61 


Following upon this comes the very obvious fact that the 
Fourth Gospel is in a very high degree a compact and 
well-ordered whole, of which every part falls in with a 
design thought out beforehand. Compared with most 
books, compared particularly with the First and Third 
Gospels, each of which is a work of great literary art of a 
simpler kind than this and quite as beautiful, this is a 
work of very elaborate and very conscious art, in which 
— worthily and nobly, of course — the writer is keenly 
aware of the effect which he means to produce on you, 
and relies for it not merely on the substance of what he 
says but also on the form in which he casts it. It may 
be compared to great drama, though the comparison 
need not be pressed too hard. In a way it reminds one 
of a great piece of music, in which several related themes 
are successively developed, with at least as many subor- 
dinate themes worked in upon the way. The drama, so 
to call it, has a prologue in which the great subject of the 
whole is within a few verses, though very subtle verses, 
set out clearly: The Word, which was from the beginning, 
and which was God, was made flesh. And within a few 
more verses we have clearly announced three great 
themes, which determine the structure of the greater part 
of the book, and which are blended in the conclusion as 
in the prologue. These themes are: — 


He came unto his own, 
And his own received him not. 
But as many as received him — 


we know the rest. 

To say that the book is planned throughout upon a 
great design does not necessarily imply that the detailed 
execution of the design has been equally careful every- 
where or has been completely carried out everywhere. 


62 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Indeed, the more magnificently wrought out the general 
conception of any work is, the greater is the chance that 
the execution of it will at some points have gone wrong or 
been left unfinished. Nevertheless I think that critics 
of this Gospel, in a near-sighted examination of the text, 
have sometimes found the flaws exactly where they are 
least present. In reading the first chapter some people 
have remarked on the way in which the Baptist is 
suddenly brought in, then as suddenly left while the 
main subject is resumed, then returned to, and so on; 
and they have asked whether the text has not got into 
a strange state of disorder, or whether some editor has 
not been combining two different documents very clum- 
sily. But in asking this they have not observed what 
the Baptist really has to do with the main subject, —a 
point to which [| shall return,— and have missed the un- 
accountable but powerful effect which these unexpected 
alternations have upon anyone who often reads the 
book and lets it take him along. 

Again, the closely knit unity of this Gospel does not 
make it more unlikely that the author is giving this origi- 
nal form to a substance which was by no means his own. 
One man has very often written as drama what another 
had written or told as a history or a tale. Shakespeare 
and all the Greek tragedians did this, and I must ask 
later whether something analogous has not happened 
here. But there is one class of views as to the character 
of this Gospel which may at once be shut out. We need 
not look out here for an older document incorporated 
piecemeal in a new book or enriched with new embellish- 
ments, or for two such documents combined by a late 
editor; for theological matter thrust into an older his- 
tory; or for historical tales superimposed upon an older 
dissertation, or anything of that kind. Two determined 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 63 


attempts have been made to analyze the book on lines of 
this sort, encouraged, of course, by the success with which 
work of this nature has been done on St. Matthew and 
St. Luke and, with immeasurably more important re- 
sults, on the Old Testament. But the results which the 
cine in question think they have reached are abso-. 
lutely opposed to each other, and competent scholars 
generally have found nothing convincing or even sug- 
gestive in either of them. It is not, however, worth while 
to examine this matter further, for in this case the great 
scholar like the ordinary reader can, if he will consider 
it, easily arrive at this positive result: that the general 
idea and purpose of the book, already spoken of, per- 
meates and moulds every part of every chapter. 

Next, the writer was a Jew. The attempts which were 
once amide to convict him of ignorance of Palestinian 
geography and of Jewish life and customs have, I may 
take it, been answered since with a aanyelksantsce which 
nearly — I fancy quite— demonstrates the contrary. 
But I have in mind here considerations of another kind. 
In style and mind he is an intense Jew. His very anger 
with his own race is that of a Jew. No Gentile, though 
he might dislike Jews, would have shown it in the same 
way ; he would have felt, for example, no interest in shift- 
ing more blame on to the Jewish Sanhedrim, off the 
shoulders of an obscure and discredited officer from 
Rome. His anger is the inverted patriotism of the prophet 
rebuking his people. There has been much speculation 
as to what he may have owed to purely Gentile influences 
or to influences not purely Jewish, especially that of the — 
Alexandrian Jew, Philo. But it is better to see plainly, 
first, what for the moment I shall only allude to briefly, 
his derivation from the main stream of the religion of 
Israel, as we see it in the Law and the Prophets. For, 


64 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


intense as is his forward gaze upon a future in which 
mere Judaism counts for nothing, it is not without a pas- 
sionate backward glance at the past. Consider, for ex- 
ample, what is signified by his one important quotation 
from the Old Testament. It stands, in Chapter xi, at 
what may be called the crisis of his argument, at the 
conclusion of his long insistence upon the Jews’ rejection 
of our Lord. It is just because the testimony of the 
prophets has now been fulfilled to the uttermost that 
this most deeply Jewish of all the Jews who wrote in the 
New Testament has, more markedly than any other of 
them, now turned his face away from Judaism. 

I speak of him as the most deeply Jewish of them be- 
cause in every feature of its style this is the most purely 
Jewish book in the New Testament except the Revela- 
tion — far more so than the Epistle to the Hebrews or 
the Gospel according to St. Matthew, in spite of the in- 
terest of the former in Jewish ceremony and of the latter 
in the fulfillment of Jewish prophecy. ‘To this it owes 
alike its unique impressiveness and a character alien to 
the tone of thought, ancient or modern, of the Western 
world. I venture for a moment on the difficult subject 
of literary style, for this reason: To thoughtful boys and 
girls of about fifteen, as formerly to grown people 
when there was no great variety of books, the beauty and 
power of this Gospel are plainly discernible. A few years 
later, when their stock of speculative notions, literary 
likings, and historical associations is larger, they are 
arrested by difficult and strange things which simpler 
readers in fact ignore, and to which they themselves have 
no clue, so that their former appreciation of the book 
gives way to considerable perplexity, perhaps some repul- 
sion. But a further stage may come to the riper student 
of history and letters; it may come also to others, say, 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 65 


to a man who has traveled far and, perhaps in loneliness 
and among strange people, read as one of his few travel- 
ing books the Old Testament. And for such maturer 
students the matters of bewilderment or offense go back, 
with more or less appreciation of what they do signify, 
into the background in which the simple reader instinc-. 
tively left them, while the things which struck the simple 
reader strike again and strike deeper, being indeed those 
things which the whole subtle art of the writer had been 
employed to make most striking. 

There is of course a great art of words,— if indeed “‘art”’ 
be the fitting name,— of which our Lord’s sayings in the 
first three Gospels present the incomparable pattern, 
which, however deep the thing that is said, speaks the 
language of all peoples and all times. With the more 
elaborate, not necessarily lesser art of this writer it is not 
equally so. There is something in the sequence of his 
ideas unlike that of a Greek or Latin or English writer, 
ancient or modern, in prose or in verse. We may see in 
it monotony and inconsecutiveness, puzzling alternations, 
and an iteration which is sometimes very impressive and 
sometimes not so; and in spite of a light and vivid de- 
scriptive touch now and then, such as abounds also in 
the Old Testament, tracts of an almost arid solemnity, 
lacking that quick and constant touch on practical duty 
which endears St. Paul tous. These have their purpose. 
For the ear that is open to them the alternation at once 
relieves and heightens the iteration; and the iteration is 
not monotonous, but very subtly modulated ; not unpro- 
gressive, but gathering new associations as it proceeds. 
The fact is that the sequence here is neither that of modern 
(and simplified) history nor of modern (and simplified) 
argument; it aims by other means, not wholly unlike 
those of music and quite natural to an ancient Jew, at 


66 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


gradually building up an idea which, though solemn, is 
not arid and not unpractical. 

Mark, for example, one sequence running (roughly in 
this order) through twelve chapters, of which any simple 
analysis is inadequate, the sounding at intervals of notes 
like these: The Life — the Light — the Life — the Wine — 
—the Water of Life— Work: “My Father worketh’— 
the Bread of Life — Work (“I must work the works . . . 
while it is day’’) —the Life —the Resurrection and the 
Life — the Water of Life —the Light — Walk in the 
Light — the Darkness and the Judgment. 

Mark again, how this method of composition ceases at a 
point to which it has all the while been leading up, and 
there follows a passage of five chapters inserted in the 
narrative, different in their style and character, and form- 
ing the kernel and the jewel of the wonderfully wrought 
work. Perhaps no such comment is needed on the chap- 
ters of unbroken narrative with which the whole work 
closes. Observe, however, that the writer does not de- 
pend for his effect upon the use of iteration alone. He 
has opened with the idea of the Word, the Word made 
Flesh; and somewhat absurd speculation has been based 
on the fact that this phrase, “‘the Word,” does not recur. 
The author has so uttered this thought at the outset that 
to the simple —or to the quite awake — reader it is 
present right through to the end. It is somewhat as, in 
a certain movement of Beethoven, one single note is kept 
vibrating upon the double basses from start to finish. 
But it is a little more subtle; it is, so to speak, a chord 
that sounds throughout; and as in the first few verses 
the note, “‘the Word,” is several times uttered before, 
once for all, we hear of the Word made Flesh; so once 
later, in Chapter vi, and again several times at the end, 
the note, “the Flesh,” is emphasized again, not in each 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 67 


case by the use of that word: the crucified Flesh; the 
pierced Flesh; the risen Flesh; the human body of flesh 
and bones with which He ascends “‘to my Father and your 
Father” ; concerning all which this record has been writ- 
ten, that “believing, ye may have life through his name.”’ 

I have not said all of this with any notion of resolving 
the Fourth Gospel into something like music. But criti- 
cism of its value as an historical document in relation to 
our Lord must be useless unless the critic recognizes from 
the start the main idea about Him which with utter con- 
viction the writer bends his whole skill to build up, and 
unless throughout he is intent to seek what gave the writer 
this belief, which is a passion. 

One more feature of the Evangelist’s literary composi- 
tion is for our purpose significant. In the earlier chap- 
ters at least it is difficult to distinguish between the speech — 
which he reports and his own commentary thereupon. 
Where exactly in Chapter one does the testimony of 
the Baptist cease and the Evangelist take up the tale? 
Perhaps we can answer with precision, but certainly not 
without a moment’s thought. Again in Chapter iil, 
9 ff., what verses belong to our Lord’s answer to Nicodemus 
and what verses to the exposition which follows? Com- 
mentators do not quite agree. Of course the writer was 
clear in his own mind, but he would not have left us in 
any doubt if he had thought it important to draw the line. 
He seems nearly as careless in dissevering what he himself 
says, in full persuasion that he expresses the mind of 
Christ, from what Christ actually said, as the old prophets 
were in distinguishing between “the word of the Lord”’ 
which “came unto [them] saying”’ such and such a thing, 
and the testimony which they themselves thereupon pro- 
ceeded to bear. And so as the story advances, a question, 
at first disconcerting, arises for us, as to the amount of 


68 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


freedom or license which he may be allowing himself in 
dramatizing his great subject. The bulk of the sayings of 
our Lord in the first three Gospels occur either on such 
occasions as thedisciples could never forget, or in the 
comparatively quiet and systematic course of instruction, © 
and in either case they were of a nature to bite deep into 
the memory. But our Lord must have said much that 
was very different in form, if not in substance; much 
also when absorbing events were moving fast, in danger- 
ous conflict, or in an hour of tense intimacy; on one 
occasion we wonder whether any human ear heard the 
words that were said. 

It is with such speech of His that this Gospel is specially 
concerned; speech of which it is impossible to suppose 
that it was remembered save in general purport and save 
for great but isolated phrases. Of course, therefore, its 
record is, in the loose sense in which I have used the word, 
dramatized. This fact by itself need not trouble us 
much. Even in a literal drama about history, the ques- 
tion of its worth as history depends upon the attitude of 
the dramatist to the event and the fullness of his probable 
knowledge ; when he knows pretty nearly what his great 
man did say at a crisis, he will certainly not substitute 
for it the necessarily less dramatic thing which his own 
imagination at its greatest heat could supply. We are 
familiar too with the convention of ancient historians as 
to speeches. They will set down what was said, or what 
they understand to be like what was said, or what in 
those circumstances that man might have said, or even 
what in retrospect should now be said; but they surely 
did the first of these things when they could. It is re- 
markable how the two historians, Thucydides and St. Luke 
(in the Acts), whose speeches are most interesting, interest 
us most just when it is probable that they either were 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 69 


present themselves or heard vivid reports soon afterward. 
But here in St. John it is, I think, something beyond the 
very obvious element of uncertainty, great or small, as to 
the literal exactitudé of his reports, which disconcerts 
people; the thought of such liberties as taken with his 
august subject is shocking. When once it has presented 
itself, some people take refuge in virtually accepting for the 
occasion the strictest theory of verbal inspiration. Others 
read this Gospel thenceforward with a watchful suspicion. 
They look for the hand of some unscrupulous theologian 
of the sort of whom later days have known many, in whom 
zeal for standard doctrine has destroyed the sense that 
truth exists. Or they fancy that the book is somehow 
tainted with a deleterious sentimental familiarity. Any 
such suspicion or repulsion affords a sure way of misread- 
ing St. John’s Gospel. 

But such feelings exist, and they have their origin in the 
tone which is now natural to robust reverence. We may 
notice how Milton, who is truly and aptly called sublime, 
“falls flat and shames his worshipers,” as far as he can, 
in the Third Book of Paradise Lost, and impresses nobody 
very much by Paradise Regained. He has stepped be- 
yond a line which we cannot help drawing. On the other 
hand, we may notice a sublimity like nothing else out of 
the Bible in the conclusions of the two parts of the Pil- 
grim’s Progress. It is attained by such homely images as 
that of a postman bringing again and again to some pil- 
grim’s lodging his quaintly chosen emblem and his sum- 
mons from an ineffable quarter, to which when the pilgrim 
drew near, “I saw him no more.” It rises perhaps to 
its highest in the reticence of the passage when Mr. 
Despondency’s daughter, Much-afraid, passes over: “His 
daughter passed through the river singing; but none 
could understand what she said.” It is in this mood of 


70 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


awed restraint that later religious writing has now and 
then become inspired. Later still we do find hymns 
which in a mild way dramatize our Saviour: “J heard 
the voice of Jesus say”’; or “Jesus speaks and speaks to 
me.” But, though some of them are by poets of no mean 
worth, they all belong to the weaker class of hymns, that 
class for which, with remarkable unanimity, the greater 
divines of very different schools have expressed aversion. 
Now an ancient Jew, though with no less reverence, and 
with an abhorrence of the “graven image” for which we 
have less occasion, drew no such line in this matter as we 
draw. The Old Testament dramatizes God quite freely. 
“The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind, and 
said —’’ then come two chapters unsurpassed in poetry. 
“Tn the year that King Uzziah died I saw the Lord —”’ 
and a mighty dialogue follows. Other passages go much 
further; in the first two chapters of Job there is an in- 
stance which jarsupon no one. In the vision of Micaiah 
the son of Imlah there is one that uplifts and thrills, of a 
procedure which, when next a modern writer attempts it, 
will be none the less abjectly ridiculous for its probably 
intentional outrageousness. 

However much or however little we may come to think 
that the Jewish writer of the Fourth Gospel makes good 
out of his pregnant imagination what memory could not 
accurately have retained, we need not imagine that this 
tells against his regard for truth or his absolute sin- 
cerity; least of all that it argues him remote from the 
living subject of his mighty theme. 

I pass to a question perhaps connected with this. Two 
impressions which have been received by readers of this 
Gospel are: that which Dr. Stanton bravely avows, of an 
indefinable unconvincingness in the general setting and 
effect of certain scenes, and that, much more commonly 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS v1 


put in plain language, of the convincing lifelikeness of 
many touches of detail. The two impressions may be 
difficult to adjust to each other, but they do not really 
conflict, and to me it seems that both are true. I will 
say nothing yet of the former, since I must later deal at 
length with the main point of importance, to my mind, in 
which this Gospel does seem to me unconvincing, while 
the other Gospels, which conflict with it, do not. But in 
regard to the latter and more familiar of these impressions 
I must touch upon the theory which seeks to do away 
with it by turning almost every detail that seems to rest 
upon historical information into an artificially framed 
allegory of deeply veiled meaning. The most elaborate 
exposition of this theory comes from the courageous and 
high-minded Abbé Loisy; but lesser people have made 
play with it not a little. 

Apart from any deeper reluctance which we may feel 
to such a view, it seems absurd to suppose that this author, 
who delighted in frank and great symbolism and used it 
touchingly and splendidly, had his mind vacant for a 
petty and niggling symbolism so constructed as not to 
tell its own tale but to tell another which was false. I do 
not wish to yield too far to this repugnance. When 
scholars who claim intimate acquaintance with the in- 
ferior Jewish writers of the time and their tricks of sym- 
bolism assure us that they clearly see some slightly fan- 
tastic significances in this Gospel, those who can claim 
no such knowledge will not wish dogmatically to brush 
aside the whole of what they say. Yet no sane literary 
critic would allow such matters to blind him to the in- 
tensely vivid dramatic interest of the writer in the actual 
history of an actual life. The Baptist’s heralding of our 
Lord; our Lord’s revelation of Himself to the Jews by 
words and by works; the Jews’ rejection of Him; the 


ne ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


wavering of many who were at first attracted to Him; 
His fuller revelation of His mind to the few unwavering 
adherents; the crucifixion; the resurrection and final 
parting — that these things really happened, as hard fact 
with ineluctable consequences, this is the primary pur- 
port of the book. Any possible source of historical un- 
truth in what it tells must be looked for in the in- 
tensity with which the Evangelist’s imagination has 
fastened on certain of these facts, not in any kind of 
disposition on his part to lose his way in trivial mystifi- 
cations. 

Looking first at the series of miracles which he records, 
we can see plainly enough the true relation in which the 
symbolic element in his writing stands to the historical. 
No doubt all but one of these has in itself, or derives 
from its context, a significance beyond that of demon- 
strating our Lord’s beneficent power. In passing, we 
may notice that the Evangelist generally takes pains 
that this significance should be clear. “I am the light of 
the world.” “I am the resurrection and the life.” No 
doubt they are selected from among the narratives of the 
kind available to him with a view to that significance. In 
or near Jerusalem our Lord makes the lame to walk, opens 
the eyes of the blind, raises the dead ; in all this the writer 
asks us to see in Him the source of more than bodily 
activity, bodily sight, or bodily life; but this must not 
obscure for us the historical point which, whether he 
exaggerates it or not, the author is all along making, 
namely, that these works were done under the eyes of 
the Jews and that it was bitter obstinacy which prevented 
them too from seeing their significance. This same ob- 
ject is pursued later by additions to St. Mark’s record 
which are entirely matter of fact in their spirit. What 
passed between the Jews and Pilate in this Gospel is given 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 73 


as purely historical narrative. If it does not rest on his- 
torical testimony, it is not allegory; it is a malignant 
lie. 

If thus in larger matters the Evangelist’s interest, 
however poetic, is historical, manifesting indeed an in- 
tense interest in what he takes to be matters of fact, it 
would be absurd to approach the minor details of his 
narrative with the expectation that he is allegorizing, 
when he seems to ordinary readers to pick vivid details 
from real life. It does not indeed follow that he is vivid 
only when he is well informed. He might, for all we 
know, construct a lifelike story out of his fancy, to illus- 
trate the true nature of the situation. Thus, when the 
blind man’s parents make their bold answer to the au- 
thorities, some say this story is so vivid that it doubtless 
came from them; more cautious people observe that the 
Evangelist does not seem to have been present. Suppose 
that he did make up the story out of his knowledge of 
those Jewish authorities and his knowledge of the blunt, 
true sense with which common people sometimes con- 
front their superiors— what nevertheless does follow 
from the lifelikeness of the story is the narrator’s appre- 
ciation of real life. It is with this in mind that we ought 
to approach the cases where the probability is enormous 
that the narrator, if not present, had been in touch with 
many who were. 

“Mary therefore took a pound of ointment of pure 
nard, very precious, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and 
wiped his feet with her hair; and the house was filled 
with the odour of the ointment.” Scores of people have 
remarked that the reminiscence of the odor filling the 
house came straight from someone who was there. But 
the Abbé Loisy says the house which was filled was the 
Church (not, by the way, a conception which is very 


74 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


prominent in St. John’s Gospel or Epistles), and the per- 
fume used was that of sanctity, which, he proceeds 
to remark, “‘has no price.” It might be unfair to ask 
whether this last is the reason why the Evangelist imme- 
diately afterward mentions the estimated value; but it 
is in any case far-fetched to put allegorizing interpreta- 
tions upon this passage at all. Here is a humanly moving 
story which the other Evangelists had already related in 
a vivid way. This Evangelist relates it again in his own 
vivid way, departing in several respects from the accredited 
record. He agrees with St. Mark in the substantial effect 
of the story, but he places the scene in the house of Mar- 
tha and Mary in Bethany instead of another house in 
Bethany; he adds the name of the woman who anointed 
our Lord; omits the alabaster vase which Mark mentions ; 
speaks instead of the quantity of the ointment; makes 
Mary anoint our Lord’s feet instead of His head (not 
improbably, since He was sitting at meat); agrees with 
Mark as to the value of the ointment, supplies, in accord- 
ance with his practice of frequently naming disciples, the 
name of the particular disciple who grumbled at the cost, 
Judas Iscariot; and he shortens our Lord’s answer by 
omitting the words in St. Mark which seem least natural, 
the prophecy of a world-wide celebrity for the woman’s 
act. Remembering, what is certain, that this writer 
knew St. Mark’s Gospel and if he were really not a person 
to be credited had the prospect of being confuted by it, 
how should we explain the close parallel and the free 
variations? ‘The writer, unless giving his own recollec- 
tion as an eyewitness, is repeating the story in the form 
in which it came to him upon authority as good as St. 
Mark’s. For this plain-sailing explanation there is no 
occasion whatever to substitute one that is more recon- 
dite. 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS 75 


This is an average example of the method of allegoriz- 
ing exposition. I will give one more, which is extreme: 
“The other disciple did outrun Peter and came first to 
the sepulchre.’”’ A common reader sees in this the charm- 
ing reminiscence of an old man recalling his emotion of 
that morning, and therewith, as such things live in mem- 
ory endeared, the little fact that once he could run fast, 
and the thrill with which he did so then. No, says a cer- 
tain critic, this would have been “vanity unbecoming to 
an Apostle.” With this monumental commencement, 
he proceeds to his own more becoming exposition. This 
little touch in the Gospel exhibits, he tells us, the jealousy 
between the Johannine and the Petrine school. Note 
there is no evidence elsewhere that either the Johannine 
school or the Petrine ever existed, and strong reason for 
suggesting that if they did exist they did not cultivate 
jealousy. It is meant to show that the Johannine school 
excelled the Petrine. Note that it shows nothing of the 
kind, since in the immediate sequel Peter arrives at the 
real goal first. 

We need trouble ourselves no further with the distorted 
views of the place of allegory in this Gospel, which of late 
have been one of the chief resources of those who do not 
think it in any substantial degree historical. Whether 
or not there be, as | think, in this Gospel some clause 
also present which has here and there falsified the per- 
spective, the common view which sees in this Gospel 
repeated signs of evidence got at first hand is a sound 
view. It does not really rest only upon the two or three 
details which are so often appealed to. If we review, as 
later I shall try to do, the broader differences between 
this Gospel and the rest in their account of our Lord’s 
ministry, we shall certainly find features in which it modi- 
fies or supplements their story, not as one re-telling it 


76 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


from some later point of view might have done, but 4s it 
could only have been done in the light of an independent 
memory of the facts. It may seem curious in a Gospel 
which is spoken of as specially theological, but it cer- 
tainly has at some points the effect of making the story 
more human. Its account of the first calling of the dis- 
ciples, which has already been mentioned, is one of these ; 
the disciples do not abruptly change their lives upon the 
sudden apparition of a commanding figure, as in St. Mark, 
nor upon the persuasion of a miracle, as in St. Luke. 
Again, the words given us in St. Mark: “Before the cock 
crow twice, thou shalt deny me thrice,” may well seem to 
have received (doubtless through the honest working of 
imagination upon memory) the addition, by a single word, 
of a certain artificial impressiveness, converting them into 
a formal prophecy of which the fulfillment is to be sur- 
prisingly exact. But in the words of this Fourth Gospel, 
The cock shall not crow till thou hast denied me thrice,” 
the “thrice’”’ is an expression of normal speech, and the 
sentence possesses the natural vigor of flashing insight. 
St. Luke simplifies the saying, as this Evangelist does, 
but there are no signs that the latter had St. Luke before 
him. The references to persons, which are more abun- 
dant in this Gospel than in the others, are moreover often 
brought in when they have no very memorable signifi- 
cance. Upon the whole they have an unquestionable air 
of naturalness. It would be ridiculous to ascribe this to 
some forger more artistic than any other of his trade. 
These, like the incidents and the descriptive details spoken 
of and like some of the more serious additions made to 
the story of the other Gospels, do point to the Evangelist’s 
command of a treasure house of real reminiscence. And 
they point to something further, and in some cases per- 
haps more certain than the accuracy of the reminiscence, 


LITERARY CHARACTERISTICS ra 


an actually affectionate interest ! in the persons and the 
scenes that he recalls.” 

_I have just alluded to the kind of naturalistic, flesh- 
and-blood interest in men and things of relative unim- 
portance of which one must be aware in passages of 
this Gospel. It is remarkable, in a work so instinct with 
a doctrinal interest which may seem abstract, that just 
the same thing may be said, though I should prefer to 
have found other words for saying it, of the author’s 
treatment of his central figure. There are passages in 
the Gospel which I think do not suggest this comment ; 
there are others as to which I am confident that this must 
be the feeling, at first blush, of any alert reader of books. 
Criticism must not lay too great a weight upon impres- 
sions of the sort with which I am still for the time occu- 
pied. Let it be assumed that more exact examination 
might dissipate them. Yet if, as I suppose, this impres- 
sion has been that of very many thousands of readers, it 
is a weighty matter for consideration. Recent writing 
has made us familiar with the word, Christology, denot- 
ing a philosophic idea which the Christian Church formed 
in the second stage of its growth, and which it is supposed 
to have unconsciously clothed with a mythical dress suited 
to the time, but which, it is suspected, bore no real relation 
to that actual Galilean artisan, the founder of the Jewish 
sect which ultimately became the Church. Taking then 
the central portion of this Gospel, which is also the most 
highly doctrinal, an ordinary, sensible reader may ask 


1Qr, as in the case of Judas Iscariot, the reverse of affectionate interest. 

2 Tt may no doubt occur to us that some features of this Gospel upon which I have 
just been dwelling are in themselves capable of two explanations. The writer might 
have much detailed knowledge or he might merely —in addition to some general 
knowledge of his subject — possess true dramatic imagination. It may or may not 
be already clear which is the right explanation; but it will become so later if we find 
that he writes throughout with reference to an earlier history and that, when he conflicts 
with it, we frequently have reason to think him right. 


78 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


himself: Is this intense writer’s main preoccupation 
the spinning of an ‘abstract Christology, or does he 
burn to set truly before us Jesus, “in His habit as He 
walked”? 


Vil 


THE ACTUAL WRITER OF THE GOSPEL 
AND EPISTLES 


THE literary characteristics which have just been noticed 
in this Gospel will have an important bearing when we 
come to consider its use as an historical authority. On 
the question, who wrote it, they have this bearing: the 
author seems to have been an intense Jew, greatly moved 
by the recent rejection on the part of his people of our 
Lord; he refers to some minor historical details on which 
he seems to have information, as if for some reason they 
interested him much; and he displays a passionate con- 
cern for what he conceives to have been the true purport 
of Jesus’ teaching and the true way of regarding His per- 
son. The fact that the book is a powerful work of art is 
evidence of this passion, and is in no way evidence of a 
state of mind which would lead him to any sort of fabri- 
cation. It must be recalled here that the book has been 
scrutinized again and again to discover whether the writer 
displays knowledge of localities in Palestine and of the 
usages and conditions of Jewish life at the time concerned ; 
an admirable examination of this matter may be found in 
Dr. Drummond’s well-known book, The Character and 
Authorship of the Fourth Gospel; but the answer is so de- 
cidedly “Yes” that it is needless to reopen the subject 
here. Recently Dr. Burney has found in the language 


80 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


of the book evidence — in his own view — that it was 
originally written in Aramaic; in the view of other schol- 
ars, that it was written by someone whose ideas readily 
clothed themselves in Aramaic idiom. Of the above con- 
siderations, none tell against the belief that this Gospel 
is in some way attributable to St. John; some of them ~ 
tell in favor of it. | 
When we come to ask what this Gospel really teaches 
us, we shall have to compare its purport with that of the 
other Gospels and to plunge deep into the question of cer- 
tain influences which might be alleged to have moulded 
its doctrine and perverted its history. It is really the 
study of these matters which has led so many to think 
that no Apostle can have been concerned with the book. 
But since that study has the opposite effect on my mind, 
I shall not affect to speak as if the result to which we have 
so far been brought were doubtful. The claim not ob- 
scurely made by the Gospel itself, supported by a really 
weighty tradition and borne out by the sort of marks of 
authenticity to which I have just referred, forces us to 
think that it has in some way St. John’s authority at the 
back of it, and conveys his testimony and his teaching. 
But it does not necessarily warrant us in going further 
and saying that this Gospel is the Apostle’s own direct 
composition, written with his hand or taken down 
throughout from his lips. Tradition was likely to be ill- 
informed as to that, and the testimony of the book itself 
is not clearly to that effect. I willat once state my own 
conclusions. First, I do not think that we have, or indeed 
are likely ever to have, the means of quite deciding this 
question, so far as the Gospel itself is concerned. Rea- 
sonable opinions on it are likely still to differ, and it is 
better to take the more cautious supposition. Secondly, 
I am myself strongly inclined to accept the view of Dr. 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 81 


Vincent Stanton, expressed in that wise and attractive 
work of his old age, the Third Part of The Gospels as 
Historical Documents, that this Gospel was actually writ- 
ten by a follower and pupil of the Apostle. Thirdly, 
since this is most important in considering the testimony 
of the Gospel, I think it certain that the First Epistle of 
St. John — probably also, if that matters, the other two — 
was the work of St. John himself, in which I venture to 
differ from Dr. Stanton and from the common assumption 
that it and the Gospel must be by the same author. 
Enough has already been said in Chapter III about the 
age in which the New Testament was produced to show 
that the kind of origin here supposed for this Gospel is a 
natural one, and to suggest the sort of relation in which 
this writer must have stood to St. John if he was not him- 
self that Apostle. The Apostolic mission was not a liter- 
ary one. It has been well remarked that our Lord Him- 
self is but once reported to have written, and then with 
His finger, in the dust. Outside this Gospel the writing 
of records for later times was the work of a younger genera- 
tion, but of one so related to the Apostles that its writings 
gained currency as in effect Apostolic memoirs. It had 
not much pride of authorship; the writers of the three 
other Gospels were as careless of perpetuating their own 
names as they — or two of them — were free in incor- 
porating what other men had written already. ‘The bond 
between these younger men and their chiefs must cer- 
tainly have been a close one. ‘There are illustrations of 
this in what the New Testament shows us about St. Paul, 
and in tradition about St. John; indeed, Christianity 
could not have taken root had there not prevailed in that 
early Christian society the spirit of loyal comradeship 
and loving service which the very idea of Christianity 
involves. But while Paul of Tarsus, at any rate in most 


82 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


of his Epistles, must have used his younger associates 
chiefly to take down dictation, it is unlikely that Apostles 
from Galilee, who had lived till middle age in Palestine, 
had a much greater facility in Greek than an elderly, 
well-educated Englishman has in French. It is more 
likely than not that, when they communicated their 
thoughts in Greek writing, they should have relied on 
friends whose Greek was a little better than their own, as 
translators and secretaries rather than as mere amanu- 
enses. We know at any rate that they were living in close 
cooperation with the men through whom their message 
was to be handed on. 

Two things result from these very Breer reflections. 
On the one hand it is entirely likely, so far as we have at 
present seen, that a Gospel should have been put forth by 
one of St. John’s followers and close associates, which 
claimed in substance the weight of his authority and 
claimed no credit of authorship for its actual writer, but 
was as a whole the composition of another man than St. 
John. It might or might not have been his express inten- 
tion that one of his followers should do this; the work 
might or might not have been partly or even wholly 
written in his lifetime; a smaller or a larger part of it 
might be written from actual notes of what he said; it is 
evidently improbable that none of it should have been so 
written. In the case, somewhat similar according to tra- 
dition, of St. Peter and St. Mark, the difference between 
the two men’s parts was noted by tradition; but there is 
a distinction between the cases, for St. Mark’s Gospel 
purports to be a record of facts which others beside St. 
Peter might have remembered, while this Gospel purports 
rather to declare doctrine which St. John was specially 
concerned to emphasize. On the other hand, it is entirely 
unlikely that such a Gospel as this should have been thus 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 83 


put forth and accepted as it was accepted, unless its claim 
to bear St. John’s authority was in some way thoroughly 
justified. The writer’s intense earnestness makes it incon- 
ceivable that he should have wished to dothis. The writer, 
if not St. John, was one that loved him and must have 
valued St. John’s actual teaching above any fancies of his 
own. Others knew and loved St. John and remembered 
his words, and without agreement on their part that this 
was a true way of perpetuating his teaching, it is difficult 
to imagine the process of floating it as a possible one. 

For these reasons I do not think that this question is 
so important as it might seem; for any important pur- 
poses it is of more consequence to consider the real inten- 
tion and purport of the book. Nor do I insist that the 
view to which I incline is the only reasonable view. On 
this particular question the reasons on either side must 
largely be matters of broad impression; the only proof 
possible would be that in course of time a critic’s impres- 
sion, once clearly set out and quietly considered, should 
come to command assent from other people, qualified by 
literary judgment and knowledge of human nature to 
judge. I shall proceed, however, to state as forcibly as I 
can and for what they may be worth the arguments — 
beyond general agreement with Dr. Stanton’s view in this 
respect — which present themselves to me. 

I must begin by recurring to that elaborately and con- 
sciously artistic character of the writing, of which I have 
already said much. Everybody can see the difference 
between the almost unconscious way in which (say) Sir 
John Franklin and Captain Robert Falconer Scott ' were 
very good writers and the highly conscious way in which 
‘Charles Lamb and Robert Louis Stevenson were very 


1] owe this remark on how well Franklin wrote to Scott. He did not seem aware 
that he also wrote extremely well; we were talking of how well Captain Cook wrote. 


84 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


good writers. The Gospel according to St. John is dis- 
tinctly good writing of the latter kind. No doubt one 
may read it without being aware of its art; it would be 
feeble art otherwise; but when one’s attention has been 
directed to it, one goes on indefinitely discovering further 
marks of literary craftsmanship. Nor need it trouble 
us that the other Evangelists too show, in a sense, some 
art of arrangement, marshaling the acts and the sayings 
which they relate, each in his own fashion. The differ- 
ence of degree between the two cases is obvious and is 
immense. . 

Now I would first ask whether the sustained and suc- 
cessful exercise of this craftsmanship 1s likely in a writer 
so aged as St. John must have been when this Gospel 
was finished. The best example that occurs to me of a 
really old man’s writing is the Laws of Plato. That 
“museum of an old man’s wisdom,” as it has been called, 
is certainly, for those who can struggle through it, one 
of the very greatest of Plato’s Dialogues, full of a riper 
good sense and good feeling and lighted up by passages 
of a simpler beauty than the rest; but in so far as the 
author attempts in it the art in which he had once 
excelled, it is a complete and dreary failure. And the 
like is to be expected in aged writers generally. This by 
itself is not decisive. It is all but certain that St. John 
was very old before the Gospel was finished, but we do 
not know how early he may have begun upon it ; it isa work 
which may have been labored at very long, and perhaps 
finished off rather hurriedly at the last. The art em- 
ployed, though very elaborate of its kind, is of a kind in 
which a diligent reader of the Old Testament would have 
been steeped. 

Again, the mere fact that a man began life as a fisher- 
man is no reason why he should not have acquired great 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 85 


literary skill. But besides having been a fisherman he 
was and continued to be an Apostle, and without dis- 
paragement of the calling of a man of letters, I have the 
same difficulty in imagining an Apostle turned aside 
to it as | should in the case of a great sailor or soldier 
with the chance of active service. There remains, indeed, 
the possibility that some such cause as prolonged illness 
or imprisonment debarred him, while his faculties were 
still adaptable, from the more active exercise of his apos- 
tleship, and turned him into a stylist, as wounds turned 
Sir William Napier. Yet on the whole the supposition 
that an Apostle can have been the literary craftsman here 
concerned seems hard. 

Whether he could or not, it seems to me extremely 
unlikely that he would have wished to handle his subject 
in this way. For one who had never seen Jesus (or per- 
haps had barely seen Him in childhood) to try to make 
the meaning of His story real to his own imagination 
by a carefully designed succession of dramatic scenes 
would be natural and fitting. But would it have been 
natural or fitting that one who had gone with Jesus in 
His daily walks, who had lain leaning against Him at that 
last supper, and had received from the Cross His dying be- 
hest, should have adopted any proceeding of the kind? 
Or would it have been altogether too cold-blooded a fash- 
ion of treating what was dearest in his memory to be 
psychologically possible in a loyal and loving man? It 
may be said that in all probability it was this same dis- 
ciple who, in the Revelation, had visions of his Master 
in glory with His voice “as the voice of many waters” 
and “his countenance as the sun shineth in his strength” ; 
and it may be asked whether it would have been less 
natural for a disciple to handle our Lord’s earthly life as 
a dramatic artist than to have these visions. I think it 


86 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


right to put this question, but my own unhesitating 
answer is that it would have been far less natural. 

I must now recall another observation already made. 
Parts of this Gospel have been felt, by some readers whose 
opinions have weight, to have the simultaneous effect of 
reality in a detail here and there and unreality in the set- 
ting, circumstances, and general character of the scene. 
If this is a sound observation, it of course suggests narra- 
tive at second hand. Passionate bias or a brooding habit 
of mind may no doubt play strange tricks with people’s 
recollection of events in which they have taken part, but 
as a rule a man of strong mind and character has a pretty 
just memory of the upshot and main significance of 
transactions which he has known. With the retailer of 
a story at second hand it is notoriously otherwise; any- 
one who has once related an interesting experience of his 
own is apt to find later on that some pungent remark or 
picturesque detail which was included in his original nar- 
rative has remained graven in the memory of a friend who 
misconceived the substance of the narrative to a remark- 
able extent. 

Now there are important scenes in this Gospel which, 
I believe, show that the very essence of the transaction 
had been apprehended by the writer; and, since I do not 
intend to fasten attention on points in the book which I 
think of secondary importance, I shall not discuss closely 
how far other scenes display the common characteris- 
tic of secondhand narration. Yet I do suspect that some 
of them may have been reconstructed by a writer who 
did not understand the situation, upon the basis of truly 
reported and well remembered sayings of our Lord’s, to- 
gether with other true touches of such minor detail as 
lingers long in memory. And there is one general charac- 
teristic of the scenes that fill a large part of Chapters v 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 87 


to xu of the Gospel which must be remarked. Every 
careful reader feels that there is a discrepancy between 
the manner in which our Lord in this Gospel unfolds His 
full claim (and that angrily) to the Jews, and the gradual 
and gentle manner in which in the other Gospels He 
leads His disciples on to understand what He is. The 
extent of the discrepancy is apt to be exaggerated, 
as I shall point out later; but a real discrepancy re- 
mains. 

Now assuming for the moment that what I have just 
said can be made good later, it will be for the reader to 
consider whether the explanation of it does not lie in the 
natural point of view of a writer in a later generation, 
who himself had learned of Jesus from the first as in full 
reality the Son of God, for whom the mass of his Jewish 
compatriots were the people who had finally and wickedly 
rejected Jesus, and to whom the splendid actuality of our 
Lord’s dealing with the religion in which he was born 
could not appeal as it appeals to us in our calmer histori- 
cal retrospect. It is possible to argue that no explanation 
is needed, and that we see here the passionate emotion 
of a disciple who had apprehended his Master’s full pur- 
port more quickly and more deeply than most, who was 
of stern and fiery, originally even of savage, temper, 
and who to the end of his days felt as bitterly about 
his Master’s death as, say, Plato felt when he wrote the 
Gorgias. I can hardly doubt that the temperament of 
St. John himself did contribute to the character of this 
Gospel in this regard, but | doubt whether that charac- 
ter can be completely explained in this way. In view of 
_ the impression which some dialogues in this Gospel create 
on many readers, it may be asked: was the disciple whom 
Jesus loved so oblivious of features in our Lord’s dealings 
with men which have left so clear an impress on other 


88 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


pages of the New Testament; and had he “so learned 
Christ iif 

I pass now to a matter which is slighter in itself, but 
which, corroborated as it is by the indications which I 
have noticed, seems to me very strong evidence upon this 
question of authorship. I speak of the famous mannerism 
by which the writer refers to St. John himself not by name 
but as “‘the disciple whom Jesus loved.” It is needless 
to insist again that St. John is the person meant, and that 
the way in which this disciple is brought in is meant to 
put him forward as the chief witness for what is related. 
No doubt from a very early time till almost the present 
day most readers, however acute, have assumed without 
difficulty that the person thus speaking of St. John is 
himself. But then, throughout all that long period, rev- 
erence for sacred writing has exercised — harmlessly 
enough in the case of the New Testament —a peculiar 
spell, such that we can often pass over what would other- 
wise seem strange or repugnant, with a comfortable sense 
that it is all right because it is in the Bible. The fact 
remains that the third person is normally used to denote 
someone other than the person who is speaking; and 
whenever we are sure that it is not so, we ought to have 
some good reason to give for this abnormal use. Could 
there be any such reason here? The phrase in question 
may perhaps seem strange in any case. That another 
writer should refer repeatedly to St. John with the ob- 
vious intention that the reference should be understood, 
and yet should never straightforwardly name him, may 
be fairly called, as I have called it, a piece of mannerism, 
but a mannerism which has a certain literary effect, which 
would not be surprising in a book so full (in a good 
sense) of artifice, and which would have nothing whatso- 
ever disagreeable in it. And it would not be carrying 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 89 


conjecture far to suggest how the phrase came to be used. 
It is much more likely than not that St. John in his remi- 
niscences tried to avoid talking about himself; it is much 
more likely than not that his hearers discovered, never- 
theless, how near he had been to our Lord. This being 
so, he may easily have come to be spoken of often by the 
endearing phrase here applied to him. In any case, many 
thousands in every century since the book was written 
must have thought by preference of St. John under the 
appellation which this writer gives to him, and the sup- 
position that in one way or another the writer himself 
had come to think of St. John in the same way is one 
which needs no more precise explanation. 

But from what kind of motive which we can decently 
attribute to him could St. John have invented this way of 
referring to himself? The current explanation, that he 
did so in modest self-concealment, breaks down as soon 
as we really consider it. In the first place, if he had writ- 
ten to give to the world his uniquely valuable testimony, 
it would have been no vanity but a matter of plain duty 
to give to what he wrote the weight which nothing but 
his actual attestation could give it. In the second place, 
anonymity in this merely literal sense did not conceal 
him in the least, and could never have been expected or 
intended to conceal him from those who were to receive 
his book and accept its authority. ‘Thus one is inclined 
to say that this way of speaking of himself would have 
been nothing but an affectation, a piece of smug self- 
complacency which would be unpleasant in anyone, and 
which in this instance it is impossible to suppose. 

I have in some points stated this case strongly, because 
it is a fact that these points strike many readers, as they 
have struck me, very forcibly. Yet I come to a conclu- 
sion on this matter with more hesitation than on any 


90 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


other important matter discussed in this essay. I may 
say at once that nothing of consequence in my further 
argument really depends on this point. But in treating 
this Gospel as an historical document we had better reflect 
that we are not certain of possessing in it the direct tes- 
timony of St. John, and must consider fairly what follows 
if we do not. Later on the reader may perhaps feel that 
this great Christian writer and the beloved disciple who 
inspired him stand out as more intelligible figures and 
nobler figures when we recognize them as two different 
men. Critics who are disposed to follow this question 
further may recall that facts which now seem obvious 
about the First and Third Gospels were till quite lately 
almost unnoticed. ‘This resulted from the dazzling effect 
of the great figure which is apparent on almost every page 
of those Gospels. In the greatest chapters of this Gos- 
pel that figure is, if possible, more clearly apparent, and 
attention is apt to be diverted from its comparative re- 
moteness in other passages. This, put briefly, seems to 
me to constitute the chief problem, from the point of view 
of mere criticism, which remains — for pupils of level 
judgment — unsolved about this Gospel. Incidentally 
this arresting effect of the most salient features of the 
different Gospels may set us thinking of the force of that 
personality to which ultimately they all owed their in- 
spiration, and on the complete assurance with which, 
in the vital respects, we can trace that personality in 
them all. 

It is only fair, however, to mention one difficulty which 
the scholar whose view I have so far adopted regarded 
seriously. It arises out of the language of Chapter i, 14, 
which it is thought may be taken as implying that the 
writer was an eyewitness. The other passages in the 
Gospel which have been similarly understood have already 


THE ACTUAL WRITER gI 


been mentioned. If we set aside, as we must, the words 
in Xxi, 24, inserted into an appendix to the Gospel by one 
who presents himself as having written neither the appen- 
dix nor the Gospel, the rest very clearly claim that the 
writer possesses first-hand information; but hardly less 
clearly they seem to distinguish him from the eyewitness 
who informed him. There remains this verse, where in 
the middle of the sentence, ‘“The Word was made flesh 
and dwelt among us... full of grace and truth,” he 
throws in the exclamation, ‘‘and we beheld His glory, 
as of the only begotten of the Father.” He 
certainly does not here distinguish in thought between 
himself and the eyewitnesses of our Lord’s mission, and 
we might suppose that he is classing himself among them 
unless we observed, what is not at first obvious, that 
he makes no distinction between those eyewitnesses and 
ourselves. | 
The real sense of this whole passage, which is admirably 
brought out by Dr. Westcott’s commentary, may at first 
be obscured when we compare it with the well-known 
opening words of the First Epistle and the words, later in 
that Epistle, ““and we have beheld and bear witness that 
the Father hath sent the Son to be the saviour of the 
world.”” With a vigorous use of metaphor to which a 
parallel may be found in Plato, this Gospel applies to the 
perception of something by no means visible in the proper 
sense, the very word that was specially appropriate to 
spectators at a play, and from which “‘theatre”’ is derived. 
The idea, in itself worth noticing, which underlies the 
interjection in this verse is more deliberately and emphati- 
cally used in the Epistle in a sentence which, though 
with some of the confusion of spontaneous eloquence, 
classes the writer among those who had seen and whose 


hands had “handled” Jesus. That this is the plain 


92 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


significance of that passage I cannot doubt; it is a natu- 
ral suggestion that when the Epistle says “we have seen” 
and the Gospel in a parallel passage “‘we beheld,” the 
word “‘we”’ in each case denotes the same group or class 
of persons. But this suggestion is refuted by a nearer 
consideration of the context. In reading the Epistle it 
is manifest that the stress laid on the writer’s qualifica- 
tion to bear witness, and the implied distinction between 
“us”? who “declare’’ what we beheld and “you”’ to whom 
“we declare”’ it, form a vital element in the whole purport 
of the book. But when we turn back to this passage in 
the prologue to the Gospel we find ourselves at a point in 
a studied and stately recital at which personal reference 
to the writer would be irrelevant and discordant, and as 
yet any allusion to the little company of original disciples 
— two of whom, purposely left obscure, are to make an 
appearance on the scene in due order — would be even 
more so. 

The real reference of the word “we”’ in this verse has 
been given already in the words, ‘‘those which believe on 
his name,” of whom it has already been said with empha- 
sis that they receive a gift and a power certainly not 
meant to be limited to the first disciples. It is unmis- 
takably implied in the words which this astonishingly 
pregnant writer uses of them, that these (the whole mul- 
titude of those, then, thereafter, and forever, who be- 
lieve) formed, from the time when the Word came to 
“his own”’ and by “‘his own”’ as a people was rejected, 
anew community, as it were a new nation, “born not 
of blood,” but with a continuous life of its own like that 
of the old Israel. The purpose for which the Word be- 
came flesh was accomplished, once for all, while He ‘dwelt 
among us... full of grace and truth”; that which in 
those few years He revealed may be said to have been, 


—_ ~ 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 93 


then and once for all, beheld by the fellowship continuing 
from that date to the end of time of those who received 
Him. This and nothing else is really involved in the 
phrase “‘we beheld” in the Gospel, and there is nothing 
strange in this use of language. If an Englishman were 
to say, ‘‘We got rid of autocratic monarchy in the seven- 
teenth century,’ or, “‘ We bore the brunt of the Napoleonic 
wars,’ it would not surprise us. He would only be using 
slightly rhetorical language, which might or might not be 
entirely suited to the occasion. In this instance a strictly 
parallel phrase is entirely suited to the occasion. ‘Thus, 
upon the assumption that the writer is not St. John, he 
is free from any trace of an attempt to pass for what he 
was not. 


Four other books of the New Testament, two of them 
important, are ascribed by tradition to St. John. It. 
would not, I think, contribute much toward the purpose 
of this study if I were to touch upon the intensely difficult 
question of the Revelation; and the conjectures which 
I cannot myself avoid making in regard to it are based, as 
I am fully conscious, upon very insufficient knowledge. 
But as to a book which in this connection, as in others, 
is of far higher importance, the First Epistle of St. John, 
I cannot refrain from stating the opinion which I have 
formed. I confess to the conviction that it was actually 
written by St. John. My reasons for here parting com- 
pany with those whose opinion [| have so far followed may 
seem inadequate, but they can be put rather shortly, 
and will at least illustrate what I have endeavored to 
point out about the Gospel. Ihave enlarged enough upon 
- certain features which strongly impress me in the Gospel, 
and which make it impossible for me to think of it as by 
the Apostle himself. [I am no less strongly impressed by 


94 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


the consideration that these features are quite absent 
from the Epistle. 

The beauty of this Epistle has a unique quality which 
lends itself ill to an analytical criticism. But it should 
be easy to evoke the reader’s own judgment on this subject 
by a few challenging remarks. ‘There can, of course, be 
no question here, as there is in the case of the Gospel, of 
whether the facts of our Lord’s ministry have been mis- 
conceived by the writer, for the Epistle says nothing about 
the earthly life of Jesus beyond its emphatic reminder 
that He did live. But as to the other points which, rightly 
or wrongly, I have alleged against the view that St. John 
wrote the Gospel, I allege the exact contrary of each of 
them in regard to the Epistle. No words in the Gospel 
can rightly be read as claiming that the writer was an 
eyewitness of our Lord’s ministry. It is far otherwise 
with the Epistle. Its vigorous opening words do un- 
doubtedly suggest, when first read, that the writer was 
himself an eyewitness, whichever of several possible views 
we may take as to why he uses the plural “we”; and it 
is not conceivable that the man who used these words 
was unaware of the suggestion which they conveyed. 
The Gospel is written with elaborate art and method. It 
is impossible to conceive a book with any character or 
power more wholly artless than the Epistle, in the strict 
and full sense of the word “‘artless,’’ which implies no sort 
of depreciation. The validity of this observation can be 
tested by anyone who will try to make a useful analysis 
of its structure and argument. He will soon confess his 
failure, and he will see that it is due not — as might hap- 
pen to him with the Gospel — to the complexity of the 
author’s method, but to that author’s having written with- 
out conscious method at all, as the stored-up treasure of 
his heart came forth. © In view of its peculiar composition, 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 9s 


I have argued that the Gospel cannot easily be attrib- 
uted to a man who, whatever his power of thought, 
belonged originally to the simple rather than to the 
learned sort and lived as an Apostle is likely to have lived. 
No book could more easily be ascribed to such a man than 
the Epistle. I have argued that the Gospel could hardly 
have been written by a really old man. No other book 
that I have seen recalls so vividly as does the Epistle 
characteristics which many of us have witnessed in a 
noble old age. 

Thus, while I find it hard now to read the Gospel with 
the belief that it was written by St. John, [ find it im- 
possible to read the Epistle with the belief that it was 
written by a follower or by an imitator. 

I here find myself confronted by the opinion prevalent 
among scholars, whether they think that St. John 
wrote these books or not: that both books are 
by the same hand. This opinion has been fortified by 
very careful and candid comparisons in detail of the lan- 
guage used in the two. The argument based on this 
rightly lays stress not on those striking and highly sig- 
nificant phrases which the two books have in common, 
yet which might obviously be the common property of a 
school, but on the ordinary and insignificant words and 
grammatical constructions for which both books show a 
preference. I submit that, when applied to some books 
of the New Testament, this argument is quite without 
the force which in other cases it might easily have. The 
so-called Johannine books of the New Testament,— in- 
cluding, though my argument does not depend on this, 
the Revelation,— unless they were all written by one 
man, point all but certainly to the influence and author- 
ity exercised by one early Christian teacher, with a dis- 
tinct mind of his own, over younger minds themselves not 


96 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


lacking in original force. That teacher must all but cer- 
tainly have been a man who used the help of a secretary 
and translator when he addressed himself in writing to 
Greek-speaking people. It is, further, much more likely 
than not that the man chosen in this way to serve a great 
teacher would later on endeavor for himself to set forth 
the same teaching more fully, and to preserve in writing 
the memory of much which the teacher had only delivered 
in spoken form. He would have become far too much 
steeped in the manner of speech in which he had once 
interpreted his chief, or helped that chief to express him- 
self, to find it easy afterwards to write differently, even 
if the mannerisms which he had learned in such a way did 
not become so consecrated for him that he wittingly and 
gladly clung to them. 

Reference should perhaps be made here to the con- 
troversy as to whether the Gospel or the Epistle is the 
earlier book, in which, of course, it has generally been as- 
sumed that both must be by the same hand. Ona careful 
comparison of the leading ideas in the two, some scholars 
have looked upon the Epistle as a forecast of a larger 
work to follow, for they point out that the ideas of the 
Epistle are developed, amplified, and added to in the Gos- 
pel; and I am a little tempted to say that in the Gospel 
the hand of the theologian, with his rather delusive defi- 
niteness, has been laid upon the missionary convictions 
of the Epistle. If St. John actually wrote the Gospel, 
this view would be incompatible with the conviction, 
made irresistible by many sentences in the Epistle, that 
it was written by a very aged man. Upon the view which 
I have suggested, this difficulty disappears. Other schol- 
ars have argued from the same data that the Epistle was 
written to recall and insist upon doctrine which the writer 
had already set forth more fully. “It is the aftermath, 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 97 


not the first-fruits of the writer’s message to the Church,”’ 
says one good commentator upon it; and this sentence 
seems to me most just. Only it must not be assumed that 
the writer’s message to the Church had previously been 
delivered to those for whom the Epistle was intended, in 
the form of a great writing such as this Gospel. Most 
Christians then, and the recipients of most of the New 
Testament, had received their instruction in the Gospel 
chiefly through oral teaching; and this writer would not 
have waited for years to deliver his message to the Church 
while he worked it up into the finished literary form of 
the Fourth Gospel. Upon the whole, the view which I 
have adopted seems to solve a difficulty about the relation 
between these two books. 

But, in any case, reasons of a sure and massive sort 
should deter us from attributing this Epistle to any mere 
follower of a great teacher. 

Let me finally illustrate their character by a single 
phrase which must be admitted to accord entirely with 
the whole tone of this letter. It is the recurrent phrase, 
“little children.”” In the concluding sentence of the Epis- 
tle, which a pathetic anxiety for his flock makes the writer 
put in the place of any proper peroration, “‘ Little children, 
keep yourselves from idols,” it is obviously not infants 
who are being specially cautioned against this particular 
danger. To later generations this manner of addressing 
a community of all ages has seemed simply touching and 
entirely natural, on the supposition that the writer is St. 
John. To the “fathers” and to the “strong young men,” 
whom the Epistle does address, it must have appealed in 
the same way, upon the same supposition. But it was 
a preposterous phrase if the man who used it was not 
both a very old man and a man who addressed this par- 
ticular flock with recognized and great authority. If it 


98 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


is assumed that the writer was not really this, but» was 
writing imaginatively in that character, then, looking at 
the whole Epistle, we must indeed pronounce that he 
carried through a difficult literary venture most surpass- 
ingly well. 

To return to larger aspects of the question: This Epis- 
tle is not to be overlooked, not to be disparaged — as 
some commentators implicitly disparage it — because it 
is not a Gospel, not to be treated as a mere appendage to 
what is doubtless an even more important book, much 
less as a faint and dispirited echo of it. Whether for the 
purpose of reconstructing our views of the past or for a 
far more useful purpose, it is a book with an independent 
and very great value of its own, containing, as we may ~ 
recall, in three words nearly the most famous and quite the 
most astonishing saying of the whole Bible, and showing 
in almost every part of it the arresting and incisive power 
of that saying. I should like to put very seriously to 
other students the problem which the Epistle thus raises. 
The intense effect which it is calculated to produce upon 
a reader is, of course, a matter of fact, just as much as 
the tendency of a certain kind of music to make certain 
kinds of people dance is a matter of fact, though there are 
people who do not dance to it. Probably a good many of 
us have missed the effect of this book; we have recollec- 
tions of it drawn from our childhood, and the familiar 
words, “God is love,” have connections with being put 
to bed. But like many other things which people are 
given to reading to children, this book is remote from a 
child’s understanding ; and what I speak of is its strangely 
different effect upon a reader who turns to it in mature 
or maturing life with an open and a fresh mind. I will not 
try to describe that effect beyond remarking that, if it is 
really felt at all, it is felt as a thing potently affecting 


THE ACTUAL WRITER 99 


the main motives of action and potently enhancing 
them. 

_ That the force with which this Epistle hits proceeds 
from the writer’s own state of mind is evident. Can we 
understand and enter into his state of mind, as one often 
and easily can enter into states of mind which one does 
not oneself share or (it may be) propose to share? 
What is the writer’s own account of how he arrived at 
this mental attitude, and is it a truthful account? Was 
his condition of mind— in which, as the driest attempt 
to analyze his words would show, the ordinary dividing 
lines between remembered fact, doctrines, and active de- 
sire. are strangely absent —something vamped up? 
Probably almost all critics would recoil at first from the 
epithet which I have used, but I use it as the best descrip- 
tion of an alternative which naturally presents itself and 
ought to be coolly faced. If not, just what was it, and 
how did the writer get there? I have all possible respect 
for the critical attempt to explain the origins of Chris- 
tianity thoroughly, but it seems to me that the serious 
work of criticism has hardly begun till the critic has again 
and again in his own mind pondered over many questions 
like these. That he need be easily able to record his 
results well in writing does not follow. 

For the much narrower purpose of my present inquiry 
the prime importance of the Epistle is this: Whether the 
same man wrote it and the Gospel or not, and whether the 
Epistle be forecast, preface, postscript, or reminder of the 
Gospel, in one respect its relation to the Gospel is certain. 
It shows us the things, in the teaching represented by 

both books, which to teacher and taught alike were of 
the greatest importance, altogether absorbing impor- 
tance. It is the gist of what the teacher from whom 
in some manner the Gospel is derived — John, for the 


100 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


speculation to the contrary is nebulous— did most cer- 
tainly teach, and taught with that iteration and that 
concentrated insistence which are characteristic of the 
Epistle. 


Vill 


GENERAL CHARACTER OF THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY 


I wish in the present chapter to consider rather more 
closely the character of this Gospel as an historical doc- 
ument and to touch upon the points in which it does 
contribute to our knowledge of the sequence of events 
in the life of our Lord.!’ But our real interest in this 
history is, above all, to understand what we can of our 
Lord’s personality as manifested in His life, and to grasp, 
if we can, the chief things that He actually taught. Ques- 
tions about minor incidents — about how much He may 
have confined His mission to Galilee, and so forth — may 
arouse our curiosity, but are secondary matters. And 
since those for whom the Gospel was first written cared 
quite as much as we for the greater matters and cared 
far less than we about accuracy in minor biographical 
details, it may well be that this book will tell us about 
what is most important more certainly than it will tell 
anything else. 

We have seen that this Gospel cannot be taken, at 
least with any certainty, to come from St. John’s own 
hand. Assuming that it did not, this implies that the 

writer may sometimes have mistaken St. John’s meaning 

11Tf this chapter overlaps Chapter VI unduly, the reason is that Chapter VI is the 
first of this book that I wrote, whereas this is almost the last, written intentionally 


without reference to Chapter VI, in order to avoid bias for my own previously expressed 
first impressions, 


102 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


or forgotten what he really said; it implies also that, 
though he derived much of his material from St. John, 
we do not know exactly how much of it; and since when 
he wrote, and still more in his earlier days, hearsay about 
our Lord, true and false and derived through many 
channels, abounded, it implies that, more likely than not, 
he combined with what St. John told him other material 
of doubtful authority. We have observed, too, that the 
book has a more marked doctrinal intention than the 
other Gospels, and therewith that it possesses a highly’ 
poetic quality and takes a form very unlike that of 
ordinary history. This implies that we cannot guess 
how far the writer might go in working up whole scenes 
out of slight recorded incidents or sayings; in choosing 
the most impressive things that tradition told him rather 
than the most authentic; even possibly, though I very 
much doubt this, in inventing incidents which he be- 
lieved to be of a kind that might have happened, and 
felt to be illustrative of an important truth. These two 
considerations, taken together, may seem very baffling. 
I believe, indeed, that because of them, the historical 
truth to be found in this Gospel is surrounded with a 
fringe of doubtful matter from which, it may well be, the 
progress of discussion among scholars and divines will 
never quite remove the obscurity. But it would be fool- 
ish to conclude from this that the historian can here find 
no firm ground at all to go upon. There are points in 
which the Evangelist’s strictly historical intention is 
unmistakable; and he writes with actual reference to an 
historical work known to his readers. 

The book is not exactly analogous to a simple history 
or to an historical drama. It is absolutely unique in 
its character because its occasion, subject, and purpose 
were unique. We begin to find a clue to the writer’s 


THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY 103 


method when we note clearly what his main purpose was. 
It was evidently to set forth Jesus of Nazareth in His 
true relation to God and man, in the respects in which 
existing books failed sufficiently to exhibit the truth and 
prevalent belief might fail to grasp it. 

It is correct enough to call this a doctrinal purpose, 
but it is a mere fallacy to infer that it has nothing to do 
with history, — a fallacy into which philosophical writers 
of the last generation sometimes fell, — for the essence of 
the doctrine lies in the significance of an historical fact. 
We might say that in his First Epistle St. John expressed 
beliefs toward which metaphysical inquiry conducted 
some of the greatest philosophers; certainly that it put 
concisely the sum of all possible ethics. But it was along 
no path of speculative inquiry that he arrived at his con- 
clusions, and along no such path that he intended to lead 
his “little children.”” The whole result, as he claims, was 
“beheld”? by him in an individual whom he beheld and 
loved. And the whole intention of the Gospel corre- 
sponds with this. “The Word was God.” ‘And the 
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”’ The Evange- 
list may or may not have intentionally used the term 
“the Word” to contrast his doctrine with that of Philo, 
whose ‘‘Word”’ was not God and was not made flesh 
and remained ever the thinnest of abstractions. But the 
force of these phrases is felt throughout the Gospel. The 
very gist of its amazing doctrine is that the fullness of 
the Godhead was made manifest in a flesh-and-blood 
individual living on earth at a particular time among a 
particular people. A doctrinal interest like this might 
have distorted his view of the historical facts, but it cer- 
tainly must have given the writer an unusually deep 
interest in them. 

There is a secondary fact of history less interesting to 


104 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


us, which to him is of great importance. The Jews 
rejected this revelation of God. Slight as is our knowledge 
of the precise story of Judaistic Christianity, it is at 
least certain how strong was the tendency among’ good 
and gentle people to try to mould their lives on Chris- 
tian teaching, which after all is, in a sense, ethical first 
and foremost, while departing as little as possible from 
full loyalty to that old Israel to which they had so many 
ties of piety and which still strove fiercely to maintain 
its highly separate national life. Such an attempt ap- 
peals to the sympathy of people to-day, especially — as 
many perhaps like to think — to that of all who are heirs 
to English traditions. But though it had its amiable side, 
it was fatal to the creation of a new and world-wide com- 
munity which was to have its one bond of union in Jesus 
Christ; and in any alliance of Christian with political 
Jewish sentiment it was the more mundane and more 
violent of the two forces that would prevail. For the 
Evangelist, as we can see in that crisis of his narrative 
which occurs in Chapter xii of the Gospel, the whole 
meaning and justification of Jewish patriotism had passed 
on to the new community into which all nations were to 
be drawn, when as a nation the Jews rejected our Lord. 
The historic fact of this deliberate, decisive, and cruel 
rejection, a generation before he wrote, is thus to him a 
subject of living interest. 

Least of all can we overlook the reality of his historical 
interest in our Lord’s intercourse with the handful who 
bore Him company on earth. The writer of the Epistle, 
when he talks of love, is not giving the results of ethical 
speculation ; the bond of real love, upon which he insists, 
originates indeed in God’s own love and is to embrace all 
men that will believe in Christ’s name; but the writer’s 
mind is on fire with the thought of the actual manifes- 


THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY 105 


tation of God’s love upon earth in Jesus Christ, and the 
wide community, throughout which that love is to be 
received and responded to, proceeds entirely from the 
real and whole-heartedly human affection that bound 
together the first disciples and One whom their hands 
could handle. The Evangelist’s relation to the writer of 
the Epistle would indeed be remote if we did not find 
throughout the Gospel, even if mingled with a more 
abstract doctrinal interest, signs of an entirely personal 
interest in that little fellowship, in the individuals who 
composed it, and in its living Head. 

I come now to the two influences which, I feel sure, 
do most to make his handling of the history in which he 
is thus interested perplexing to his interpreters now. We 
might think, as I have already suggested, that the 
Evangelist would write an historical drama on the theme 
just indicated, or a history developing that theme with 
something more of the dramatic spirit than is present in all 
natural story-telling and in all except the worst histories. 
Whichever form of this simple idea we adopted we should 
find it misleading, because, for all his art, he is not writing 
in accordance with any existing pattern, but writing for 
a particular purpose under particular circumstances. 
Now, in the first place, he is a preacher and a pastor, 
concerned with men’s lives; he is not contented with the 
abstract proposition of divinity that Jesus is the Son of 
God, or with the historic fact that, as he believes, Jesus 
was abundantly manifested as such; that idea is to come 
to his readers with some illuminating power or dynamic 
force; and this is all the more necessary since he is leav- 
ing unnoticed all that wealth of direct and practical 
precept in which the teaching of Jesus abounded. ‘There- 
fore he recurs insistently, as has been noticed in a previous 
chapter, not to the bare idea of our Lord’s Divinity, but 


106 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


to such ideas as a Life to live, a Light to walk by, an 
energy of God working from the beginning, working in 
Jesus Christ, and to work in us. His intention to do this 
might well override his interest in the chronology of our 
Lord’s life. 

But in the second place, he is not writing for people 
who knew little about our Lord; nor presumably is he 
writing, as St. Luke seems to have done, in order to 
supersede earlier books through which they knew about 
Him. I shall recur later to the startling way in which 
he ignores all that we should, without him, think most 
characteristic of our Lord’s teaching, and for the moment 
refer only to the narration of His life. There were certain 
things on which this author felt it necessary to dwell 
fully, and sometimes for the sake of enforcing them, 
sometimes through the play of his own human interest 
in the events, he was led to correct or amplify or set in a 
new light what had already been well told about our Lord. 
But there was no occasion for him to tell again all the 
chief things that had been told about our Lord before, 
necessary though it would have been to do so in writing 
a new history book or in constructing a drama. Anyone 
can easily notice allusions in this Gospel, such as can only 
be explained in this way, to what the reader is supposed 
to know already. “For John was not yet cast into 
prison’; specially interested as the writer is in the 
Baptist, he says no more about his imprisonment. Again, 
“the twelve” suddenly appear, but he never tells us 
who they were. On general grounds it would be over- 
whelmingly probable that the writer of the Fourth 
Gospel was acquainted with some earlier written account 
of our Lord’s life. As a matter of fact, he clearly had 
St. Mark’s Gospel before him. There is no real sign of 
his having either of the two others before him; this 


THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY 107 


might be because he did not know them, which would 
tend to prove his early date, or because he regarded St. 
Mark as especially authoritative.t_ I may here then take 
it as unquestionable. The fact, so easily overlooked but 
so simple when once noticed, that this Gospel is written, 
so to speak, on the top of St. Mark, is the key to many 
difficulties. We may recall here that many ancient writ- 
ers were in a position similar to that of a man making a 
speech with his eye on the clock; they aimed at writing 
what would about fill a roll of a given ‘size, and they did 
so with hardly any of our conveniences; they expanded 
here and condensed or omitted there just as a speaker 
does. Again, we may recall that one is naturally reluc- 
tant to tell again what has been told already in a way 
which one cannot better. Thus, though a writer’s choice 
at each moment of what he will tell or treat as known 
already is likely to be rather wayward, we need never be 
surprised at this Evangelist’s omitting anything which 
can be found in St. Mark, and we can never infer from 
his omitting it that he was ignorant of it or disbelieved 
it or thought it unimportant. And this relation of the 
two books has a further consequence. When important 
features of the narrative in this Gospel appear to con- 
flict with what we should have gathered from St. Mark, it 
is almost impossible to suppose that this Evangelist 
wrote at random and without information which seemed 
to justify him. To make that supposition reasonable we 
should have to show not merely that the writer had a 
doctrinal purpose to serve, but that he could not have 
served it so well without thus taking the risk of dis- 
crediting himself. 
We must then take these two books together so far as 


1 Students should not take this point for granted; they will find the evidence 
plainly set out in the last chapter of Dr. Stanton’s book, 


108 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


their subject matter overlaps. It would be absurd, a 
thing which no reasonable man does in other matters than 
New Testament criticism, to assume that, if they seem 
to conflict, one has to be right throughout and the other 
wrong throughout. Also, when a capable writer some- 
what later, with apparently some fresh sources of infor- 
mation, concerns himself to amplify and correct an earlier 
writer, it is likely that his information generally justified 
him in doing so — likely also that he is liable to some 
errors of his own. These, of course, are only presump- 
tions; but at the outset we had best bear them in mind. 
Yet I think it is within rather strict limits that we 
should try to make a clear and connected story out of the 
two, because each was probably indifferent to the sort 
of detailed chronological biography for which our in- 
quisitiveness looks. We may observe a startling instance 
of such indifference in another New Testament writer, 
St. Luke. He bestows some pains on dates which have 
a real historical significance; but in finishing his Gospel, 
which is the longest book in the New Testament, he was 
possibly pressed for space after inserting at length a most 
interesting incident, and leaves us with the impression | 
that certain events occupied less than forty-eight hours. 
Later he begins the story of the Acts by telling us that 
those events lasted over forty days; for the chronological 
fact has there some bearing on what is to follow. St. 
Mark, similarly, must often mean very little when he 
says “after these things”’ or “the next day.”’ Of course 
there is a broad sequence of events to which he is keenly 
alive; some things belonged to the opening days of our 
Lord’s mission and are narrated with a rush and a swing; 
after an intermediate period, told of with some signs of 
confusion, there comes a strongly marked crisis in our 
Lord’s dealing with His disciples; and from that point 


THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY fore) 


events flow on rapidly but solemnly to the great con- 
clusion. But beyond this we can hardly think that St. 
Mark would trouble to get minor events into their right 
order and to mark the intervals between them. He had 
to set down the things which he related in a way which 
would carry a reader along, and would instinctively avoid 
the repulsive form of a mere collection of anecdotes; but 
we must not imagine that he would do this in a way which 
would really have been pedantic. 

Even if he had cared more for the exactitude which we 
might wish from him, the information he wanted would 
probably have failed him. Any man to-day who has 
much to interest him would often find it impossible to 
say offhand whether a somewhat memorable journey of 
his took place two years or three years ago, or whether 
he had visited (say) Rome, four, five, or six times in his 
life; his talk of that journey might leave his friends 
under some mistake as to when it happened, and he 
might speak often of Rome without its appearing whether 
he had been there more than once or whether he went 
there regularly once a year. ‘This illustrates the sort of 
data which St. Mark probably had to use in regard to 
matters of secondary importance, which matters of the 
very highest importance threw into the shade. 

When the Fourth Evangelist wrote to say just such 
things as St. Mark had not said, and incidentally therefore 
to correct him, he must have thought first of saying his 
own say well; we can hardly think that he was nearer 
to the point of view of a modern writer of a “Life” than 
St. Mark had been — indeed, in some respects he was 
evidently further from it. There are obvious points in 
which he challenges the question whether he is right 
when St. Mark seems to say otherwise; but we need not 
think of him as bound to show us just how the things 


110 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


he tells dovetail into another man’s narrative; nor, even 
if at some points he seems more accurate than St. Mark, 
are we sure that his information — or if he was St. John 
himself, his memory — would have enabled him thus to 
gratify us. 

Two valuable books on this subject have appeared of 
late years, the inspiring fragment (unhappily left a frag- 
ment) of Dr. Scott Holland’s work, The Fourth Gospel, and 
Canon Richmond’s The Gospel of the Rejection. Both 
are illuminating, but I rather wonder whether the bold 
conjecture with which both would make one complete 
narrative out of two incomplete ones adds to their value. 
In any case it is my object here to say things which I 
cannot doubt. For the reason just given I do doubt 
how far the two Gospels before us can be neatly pieced 
together. We cannot quite measure how far the Fourth 
Evangelist may not have been ready to go beyond his 
historical data in pointing his broad historical truth; 
but this need not keep us from attending to him when he 
evidently means to correct an earlier historical. view. 

As to the external course of events, the test of the 
historical worth of the Fourth Gospel is whether we 
believe that our Lord went more than once to Jerusalem 
after His mission began. Now His mission plainly lasted 
longer than the minimum period into which some people’s 
imaginations have compressed the transactions actually 
recorded by St. Mark. He acted by human speech upon 
human minds, and all our knowledge of human affairs 
bids us say that the impression on human minds which 
resulted later in the Sermon on the Mount and in the 
Epistles was effected not in some months but in some 
years — not necessarily many. Then in that space, 
amounting to (say) two to three years, did our Lord, 
who is represented as much afoot, never traverse the 


tits GOSPEL” AS* HISTORY: III 


sixty to one hundred miles which may have separated His 
Galilean resort for the moment from Jerusalem? We 
do not exactly know with what practical qualifications 
He observed the very impressive law about the three 
feasts at Jerusalem while, according to an authority 
other than St. Mark or St. John, He condemned the 
teaching of any departure from the law “‘till the time be 
fulfilled” ; but it is vastly improbable that He was more 
lax than ating? people about it. 

Again, we must not speculate too epnaientie as to how 
He would deliver his message; but on no possible view of 
Him or of His message can we easily conceive of Him as 
hesitating to deliver it to the leaders of His own Jewish 
religion at the supremely important centre of that 
religion. Again, if the crowd in Jerusalem had known 
Him previously only by hearsay, the reception given Him 
upon the visit there, of which St. Mark tells us, would 
be somewhat unaccountable; so too would it be that, 
after His death, multitudes there received so gladly from 
Galilean strangers the report of His resurrection and 
accepted His teaching through them. But above all 
we have to account for speeches of His which are reported 
evidently without guile, by other authorities than the 
Fourth Evangelist, for example, “Oh Jerusalem, Jeru- 
salem, how often—.’ This saying does not stand 
alone; in other sayings and parables, one of them given 
by St. Mark, the rest coming to us from another source, 
not invented for this purpose, He speaks of the Jews 
“rejecting Him, as He could never have done if till those 
last few days before His Passion He had limited Himself 
to teaching up-country people in Galilee and never given 
Jerusalem a real chance either to accept or to reject. 

On the whole, it is not a reasonable supposition that 
He had never come up to a feast and never taught in 


112 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Jerusalem before that last occasion. It does not follow 
that the Fourth Evangelist, who tells us of these previous 
visits there, had exact information as to just how often 
they occurred, and what happened on each occasion, or 
that he cared much about detailed accuracy in that 
respect. 

At this point we may wonder how St. Mark could have 
left out what seems to us so important a fact in our Lord’s 
biography. I believe that our difficulty in this respect 
arises only from a false idea of the character of his book. 
We expect, quite without reason, that this, our primary 
source for our Lord’s life, shall have been written with 
the same sort of aim with which articles are composed 
for the Dictionary of National Biography. Biography in 
that sense was not demanded. The Second Gospel, it is 
true, is much more like a piece of plain historical narrative 
than is the Fourth; yet that Evangelist also is a preacher 
who wishes to tell, however truly, not all the facts which 
might be demanded for a cyclopedia, but facts enough 
to show what to him seem the chief aspects of our Lord’s 
life. He too tells his story with a method and a force 
which have been very much underrated, chiefly perhaps 
because we seldom take a Gospel and read it straight 
through. And he has to develop his main theme in a 
book which is intended to be short, using for that purpose, 
though with some exceptions, a compression which is 
extraordinary though most effective. Now if we read 
St. Mark quickly through, we are led with startling 
rapidity into the midst of scenes in which our Lord is 
pursuing, in the countryside best known to Him, a mission 
not of controversy but of teaching and of compassion, 
with a chosen band of followers who are learning to 
understand Him. Suddenly the time comes when they 
see Him clearly as the Messiah, but are forbidden to 


UAISYGOSPEL AS HISTORY Uk 


proclaim Him as such. Almost from that moment begin 
the stages of His progress toward the Cross, a progress 
marked by a succession of scenes in which they are being 
taught the bewildering lesson of what the Messiahship 
really means. The effect of this upon us is, of course, 
intended. 

I shall have to ask in the next chapter whether St. 
John’s teaching compels us to think St. Mark’s view of 
our Lord’s life substantially untrue in any respect. The 
point to be noticed here is that St. Mark could not, within 
the narrow compass of his book, have told his story with 
anything like the same effect if he had complicated his 
task by introducing a number of journeys to Jerusalem, 
with the controversies to which they led. Possibly he 
knew very little about them, and his simplification of 
the story was made easier by St. Peter’s having chiefly 
dwelt — as well he might — upon scenes in Galilee, up 
to the moment when his own great confession was 
made. In any case nothing follows from his omissions. 
Look at the book. Any argument based upon what it 
does not say is absurd. I have already pointed out that 
it is also a mistake to argue from mere omissions in the 
Fourth Gospel. 

Each of the several instances in which it is independ- 
ently likely that the writer of the Fourth Gospel does 
correct the historical view derived from St. Mark adds 
to the general likelihood of his being well informed in 
most of them. I only wish to touch lightly upon a few 
more of the points in which careful scholars feel that this 
Gospel gives us a clearer historical view. St. Mark’s 
account of the sudden call which the first four Apostles 
obeyed is dramatically impressive, but were they quite 
so unprepared for that call as he leaves us to think? St. 
Luke seems to have felt a difficulty about this and found 


114 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


a way of answering it. This Gospel gives a more natural 
explanation: that these men had been followers of John 
the Baptist and began to know our Lord when with him. 
It accords with this that a Gospel coming from a pupil 
of one of these men, if not from himself, should show a 
special interest in the Baptist. 

Rather tiresome attempts have been made to magnify 
the slight discrepancies here between St. Mark and the 
later Evangelist. These are well within the ordinary 
limits of divergence between any two genuine accounts 
given long afterward of the same transaction. Very 
likely the later writer wanted to make as emphatic as 
possible what he had heard — doubtless not with verbal 
exactitude — about the testimony of John the Baptist. 
St. Mark, however, has already in two verses made this 
tribute of that forerunner to Him who was to come as 
high as possible, before he brings Jesus upon the scene. 
Having done so, he hastens to transfer his whole interest 
to our Lord alone, though the figure of the Baptist still 
possesses him enough for him to interrupt his course in a 
later chapter with the story of the Baptist’s death. There 
have been speculations, too, as to controversial purposes 
which the Fourth Evangelist has to serve in the passages 
about the Baptist; but one cannot suppose that he is 
lying when he claims, as he really does, to have knowledge 
about the Baptist, derived through Apostles who have 
been his followers. Much the most natural view of this 
part of the Gospel is that the writer expresses an affec- 
tionate interest taken long afterward in the memory of 
the Baptist; for he is the person whose figure gains 
added regard from these chapters. The curiously ex- 
cited phrase, “He confessed, and denied not, but con- 
fessed, | am not the Christ,”’ seems, as Dr. Holland 
remarked, to reflect the surprise of the disciples who 


THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY II5 


heard him. The moving words, “He must increase 
but I must decrease,” have the ring of nature, not of art, 
and their whole context has the air of coming from some- 
one keenly interested in the Baptist. . 

As the two Gospels proceed, their subjects become for 
a while largely irrelevant to each other. One is con- 
cerned with that side of our Lord’s mission which must 
have contributed most to the teaching and the training 
of His chief disciples, the other with the growth all the 
while of antagonism to Him among great people in 
Jerusalem. Some such development of the conflict 
surely took place, for the ultimate combination of the 
Pharisees with the Sadducees to destroy our Lord was a 
thing which needed much to bring it about. The Evan- 
gelist has a reasonable account to give —in Chapter x1 
— of the final agreement of these parties, and later on of 
the kind of pressure which they were able to put upon 
Pilate. Meanwhile, it seems that our Lord had put a 
strain on the allegiance of many in Galilee who had at 
first heard Him gladly, and the description given by 
this Gospel — Chapter vi — of the fluctuation and falling 
away among the crowds who followed Him helps us 
much to understand the course of His career. None of 
these things, so credible in themselves, are such as the 
author, whatever his doctrinal tendency, is likely to have 
related for any reason except that he happened to know 
them. 

Now there are definite features of our Lord’s dispu- 
tations in Jerusalem in which many people feel that this 
Gospel must be mistaken; and while the occasions of 
some of these dialogues might well be long remembered, 
it would be likely that disciples from Galilee present at 
them would be somewhat excited and troubled hearers 
of what passed, not a little bewildered themselves by what 


116 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


our Lord said in challenge to the leaders of the Jews. 
Some few specially striking sayings might indeed sink 
deep into the memory of a gifted young man devoted to 
Him, but we can hardly suppose that the general course 
of each of these discussions could be reported after an 
interval with that fidelity to which so much of our Lord’s 
simple teaching lent itself, or would have been kept alive 
in memory by repeated instruction to the faithful after He 
had gone. This subject must be dealt with further in 
the next chapter. Here we only note, as additions to 
St. Mark’s narrative which we can hardly doubt, that 
our Lord had indeed sought often to gather the children 
of Jerusalem under His wings, and that, in return, a 
bitter animosity to Him was growing. 

As we approach the close, another test question as to 
the trustworthiness of this Gospel arises. Was the Last 
Supper, as the first three Gospels imply, the Paschal 
meal, or, as this Gospel says, was our Lord crucified at 
the time of the killing of the Paschallamb? It was surely 
easy for Christians years later to assume mistakenly that 
the first Eucharist was the Passover; and the report of 
His instructions to two disciples to secure a room for the 
Passover, and of His moving words, “ With desire I have 
desired to eat this Passover with you”’ (a desire which 
may not have been fulfilled), may easily have been mis- 
interpreted later. On the other hand, we might indeed 
think it easy for one who regarded our Lord as the Paschal 
lamb to wish to fix the time of the crucifixion as this Gospel 
fixes it; but it would be amazing that, when the other 
view was before him in a narrative carrying great author- 
ity, he should for a preference of that kind have con- 
tradicted that authority without information of his own 
to back him. Moreover, any idea that we can form of 
the situation at Jerusalem makes it probable that the 


THIS GOSPEL AS HISTORY 117 


Jewish authorities would take all possible pains to dis- 
patch the matter in hand before the Feast of the Pass- 
over began, and St. Mark himself has recorded their 
anxiety to do this. All likelihood is then in favor of the 
story as told in the Fourth Gospel. 

Lastly, our attention is claimed by two remarkable 
omissions in the part of this Gospel which deals closely 
with events also recorded in St. Mark. The first is that 
of the incident in the Last Supper which we may call the 
institution of the Eucharist. It is almost incredible that 
a Christian, about the end of the first century, either did 
not believe in that act of institution or was uninterested 
in it. Chapter vi of this Gospel may fairly be taken as 
making it specially unlikely in the case of this author. 
Yet this Gospel, though it takes up what St. Mark tells 
about Judas and about St. Peter at the supper, and deals 
with it in a way which adds to the interest of the story, 
is blankly silent about the bread and wine. The second 
is the omission of the scene at the public trial before the 
Sanhedrim. Our Lord’s ultimate confession at that trial 
is, as we shall see later, the very climax of the account of 
His revelation of Himself as given in St. Mark. St. 
Mark’s story of the matter is not traversed in this Gospel 
by a wholly different account of the same transaction, as 
a reader of our Authorized Version might suppose. The 
true rendering of the verse, John xviii, 24, in the Revised 
Version makes it clear that the whole scene of that public 
trial, which was bound to take place, is here dismissed 
with two verses— 24 and 28— implying that it did 
take place, and (between those) with that conclusion of 
the story of Peter’s denial which preceding passages in 
this Gospel made necessary. In any complete story of 
these events, as they had impressed the men concerned, — 
the scene at the public trial must have been made 


118 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


prominent. If this writer, who knew the Second Gospel, 
had wished to correct its account of the trial scene, we 
know that he would not have hesitated to do so. What 
he does is simply to omit the scene. But he gives us 
another scene which went before it, and for which he 
implies that he had a special source of information. ‘This 
is an informal examination of our Lord, during the hours 
that had to elapse between His arrest and the daytime, 
when the trial could lawfully take place, in the special 
apartments of Annas, the chief of that seemingly most 
unpleasant family of which the high-priesthood was for 
a long time the property. In this additional scene there 
is no doctrinal purpose served, but it is a scene full of 
character and life, which really enriches that history 
which we obtain as a whole when we take the Gospels 
together. Notice also the scene before Pilate in this 
Gospel. Our Lord, in John xviii, 37, does not deny that 
He is a king, as the Messiah was to be; but He does not 
allow Himself to be taken as affirming it without an ex- 
planation of the wholly new character of His Kingship. 
This is exactly in keeping with St. Matthew’s correction 
of St. Mark (mentioned in a note to the next chapter), in 
the scene before the Sanhedrim. 

There is only one natural way of interpreting these two 
omissions. The writer treats his readers as knowing the 
facts sufficiently from St. Mark. 

I would recall in one sentence certain points which 
corroborate what is here said, but which have been suf- 
ficiently mentioned in our earlier survey of the literary 
characteristics of this Gospel; and I may now sum up. 

We must fully recognize that this Evangelist writes, 
as indeed in a less degree did the others, but much more 
markedly than they, with a special preaching purpose — 
not exactly with a controversial purpose, but with a view 


THIS GOSPEL ~AS HISTORY 119 


no doubt to tendencies which he thought enfeebling to 
Christianity. And we must recognize what indeed is 
harder to allow for exactly, that he chose a peculiar and 
highly poetical method of his own, which is not that of 
a man who would simply record historical facts in due 
order and proportion or with any pretense to complete- 
ness, though it is even less that of an aloof philosopher or 
of a mere contentious theologian. These two causes may 
have overridden his strictly historical purpose in more 
than one respect and to an extent of which in some in- 
stances we can hardly feel certain; for he is a many- 
sided writer—few more so; his moods are intense, and 
they may have been variable. It is arguable that he 
might sometimes be carried to a serious extent beyond 
what the information before him —or, alternatively, 
his exact memory — justified. This should be remem- 
bered. It is certain that he had neither the wish nor the 
space to carry his historical purpose to the full length 
which we should demand of him if we wished to make a 
complete “harmony of the Gospels” for the whole period 
of the history concerned. 

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt stevie that the 
main features fi his narrative are dictated by an interest 
of the most intense kind in broad historical truth as 
such; that this interest goes beyond broad outlines of 
history and attracts him at times to details which might 
relatively be called petty; that this interest is of no dry 
or in any way pedantic kind, but living, personal, and 
loving; and that with these qualities there goes, what is 
very common in genial and imaginative natures, a fre- 
quently displayed liking for exactness. 

And there can be no doubt that he had at command a 
store of actual information which, as the many and va- 
rious points at which we can detect it show us, must have 


120 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


been large. For apart from the many little things that 
I have passed over, which seem to show knowledge of the 
land and the times, there are a number of points in which 
he conflicts — knowingly, we may be sure — with what 
St. Mark says or seems to say, or supplements it in a 
manner which somewhat surprises us; and the balance of 
probability, so far as we can estimate it, is in his favor in 
so many of these instances, and to such an extent, as to 
be conclusive. | 

It is, lastly, evident that he wrote with deliberate 
regard to St. Mark’s Gospel, intending to add something 
which was lacking in it and, where necessary, to correct 
it. And the manner in which he carries out this purpose, 
omitting matters which would have been most germane 
to his purpose if his book had stood alone, makes it un- 
questionable to me that he assumes St. Mark’s narrative. 
To the extent to which he does not correct St. Mark, he 
corroborates him. 

JI pass now to a question which is more important, and 
which is independent of the accuracy of this Gospel in 
regard to external events. I shall argue in the next 
chapter that this Gospel in any case gives us a view of 
our Lord’s personality upon which we may rely. That 
argument can, | think, stand on its own bottom; and I 
had better, perhaps, explain that my conclusion was 
formed — and the following chapter was in substance 
written — long before I had much studied the subject of 
the present chapter or suspected to what a great extent 
this Gospel is replete with actual history. None the less, 
the conviction which I shall urge, that our Lord’s whole be- 
ing and bearing are set forth in a true light by St. John’s 
follower, unless, indeed, it be by St. John, gains strength, 
since we have here seen that that writer handled lesser 
matters of history with knowledge and discernment. 


IX 
OUR LORD AS SEEN IN THIS GOSPEL 


Wuart does this Gospel tell us about our Lord’s mind and 
ways of dealing, as He bore Himself, a man among men, 
upon this earth? [ shall forbear for a while the question 
closely associated with this, of the doctrine which He 
taught concerning His real being and His mission. I am 
speaking here of the character by which He impressed Him- 
self on those who were nearest to Him. For He certainly 
made an impress upon them by the way in which He 
spoke with and treated them and others, before they ever 
sought to define His relation with God. The manner of 
His action and the qualities which they saw in Him are 
the things about which their memory could least deceive 
itself. Ifa writer with sympathy and imaginative power, 
who presumably had come much under the influence of 
any of them, does convey to us some definite impression 
in this respect, that impression would demand attentive 
consideration even if we assumed that in other respects 
he was romancing. 

This writer does convey to us such an impression, 
very clear to the mind, though not easy to set on paper. 
And if we ask whether that impression is trustworthy, we 
really possess a very sufficient test of its worth. For we 
have already from other sources some image of Jesus as 


122 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


He was, and if we find that anything in this Gospel ren- 
ders it more intelligible and more living, find that, this 
further source being added, a more real person and a 
greater stands before us, reason will suggest that that 
person is not the product of any fancy, or of any queer 
turn taken by the history of ancient thought. 

Let me first point out that we do possess outside 
this Gospel a standard by which we can judge what it 
tells us in this matter, and then ask where we should look 
_ in this Gospel for the clearest traces of our Lord. 

Great numbers of ordinary readers have derived, mainly 
from the first three Gospels, a knowledge of Jesus Christ 
amounting to what, though my own phrase jars on me a 
little, I can only call personal acquaintance. People 
have remarked lately that we know very little about our 
Lord. That is true of a part of the details which biog- 
raphers generally labor to tell us, but this sense of acquaint- 
ance with His person, which those of us who are inter- 
ested in Him at all possess, really far exceeds anything 
similar that we possess in regard to any other historical 
figure. In occasional moments of confidence two of us 
could discuss together what Jesus Christ would have said 
or done in any given circumstances. We should do so 
with a reality of interest, and what is more, with a pros- 
pect of fairly definite result, to which there is certainly 
no parallel. To suppose that this figure that we know is 
a creation either of art or of accident would be absurd. | 
Yet if corroboration is wanted for the idea which we thus 
draw from the Gospels, corroboration is ready. In early 
writers so different as Clement of Rome, St. James, the 
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, St. Peter, the author 
of the Acts, and St. Paul with the peculiar and penetrating 
knowledge which he gained as a persecutor, we find con- 
cordant testimony to what might loosely be called the 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 123 


Christian rule of conduct, accepted from the first, or 
rather to the Christian pattern of manhood and woman- 
hood. ‘The traits of this pattern are those of the historic 
Jesus. The only rule is “the measure of the stature 
of the fullness of Christ.”” The pattern has, above all, 
this utterly singular feature which again we can hardly 
ascribe either to art or to accident: it is originally the 
type of a man with the intellect and temperament of 
genius, and with will and nerves of steel, engaged upon a 
strange, tremendous enterprise, yet it is without hesitation 
taken home for personal use by people whom differences 
of intelligence, temperament, circumstance, vocation, 
strength, race, age, sex, would seem to place immeasur- 
ably far from Him. In this confidently challenging 
statement of the case there are many points over which 
a critical reader will stop and ask questions— some of 
them to be faced later on. But common sense leans 
against the view which [| believe to be the strict alterna- 
tive to my own: it makes it hard to think of the Christian 
ideal, which is a substantial presence in the world, as con- 
nected mainly by accident with a Jesus of Nazareth whose 
flesh-and-blood attributes lie hidden in a region of myth. 

It is, then, not a fanciful proceeding, not a matter of 
asking what would be nice to believe and straightway be- 
lieving it, if we seek next for what this Gospel contributes 
to a knowledge of our Lord, which would be very con- 
siderable without it. There is a section of it, Chapters 
Xili to xvii inclusive, in which, apart from doctrinal pre- 
conceptions, ordinary readers are apt to think Him vividly 
present. To this and to Chapter xii, which may be said 
_ to form the transition to this from the preceding section 
of the Gospel, I shall turn first. There are, however, 
considerable parts of the preceding section of the Gospel 
about which, as a matter of fact, many such readers have 


124 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


precisely the opposite feeling. I shall turn later on to 
that portion and ask whether the discordant effect which 
it produces does, if put at its highest, drive us to suspect 
that after all the Evangelist was ignorant of Jesus Christ. 
It will be at once noticed that Chapters xiii to xvii are in 
one way by far the most important part of the Gospel. We 
know well from the first Epistle what were the ideas which 
were most strongly impressed upon the circle from which 
this Gospel came, and it is in this section of it, far more 
than elsewhere, that those ideas have full and insistent 
expression. A little further consideration will show us 
that, so far as concerns the character and teaching of our 
Lord and not the mere circumstances of His career, this 
section possesses an authority in which what precedes it 
is — comparatively, at least — lacking. 

For, assuming that he writes with some knowledge and 
understanding, on what parts of his subject will this Evan- 
gelist’s knowledge and understanding be greatest’? He is 
occupied, as has been said, with a double theme: how 
Jesus Christ was rejected by the mass of those who should 
have been “his own,’ and what He imparted to the few 
who “‘received him.’ The two central acts, as it were, 
of his drama are respectively concerned in the main with 
the two sides of this contrast. Now take on the one 
hand our Lord’s intimate converse in a supreme moment 
with a few who were very near and dear, converse in which 
the Evangelist would have us think his own informant 
was in a way the nearest of them. Take on the other 
hand our Lord’s controversies with enemies, controversies 
at which “that disciple’? may sometimes have been pres- 
ent, desiring— it is probable — to call down fire from 
Heaven, but in which he took no part, did not of course 
sympathize with the Jews, and could not possibly 
at the time have fully understood our Lord— contro- 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 125 


versies which culminated in the cruel act which must 
have eclipsed all other memory of them. Of which of these 
would that disciple’s memory be more certain to guard, 
long after, a deep and faithful impression? In the case of 
which did the play of later meditation conduce to fuller 
understanding (even though the words might be lost), and 
in the use of which did it lead on the contrary to intensi- 
fication of a feeling that might distort the actual fact? 
Which furnished of necessity the staple of his oral teach- 
ing — marked by that iteration which the Epistles of St. 
John reflect — of his own intimate pupils? Finally, if we 
consider the pupil who ultimately enshrined his teaching 
in writing, with the motive, which appears in the first 
Epistle, of conserving the mutual love of the flock, and 
with the motive too of marking the finality of their 
severance from Judaism — in which of these parts of the 
Gospel would he probably display the more genuine de- 
sire and the more intelligent capacity of rendering truly, 
though with whatever freedom of rhetorical composition, 
the core of what he had been taught? In which part 
would he have been likely (in spite of the many minor 
details which he might retain correctly in notes or mem- 
ory) to fall into some radical misinterpretation of the past 
situation as a whole? 

These questions can only be answered in one way. We 
are assuming the writer to have been a hearer of an actual 
disciple, though only a slight change would be needed in 
the form of our inquiry if we took him to be that disciple 
himself ; on either assumption we are most likely to find 
the clear impress of the historic Jesus in the account given 
_ of His converse with His disciples in Chapters xii to xvu, 
and what immediately leads up to that account. In 
considering it we shall be interested not so much to ask 
whether the whole scene passed quite as is related, but 


126 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


rather whether Jesus faced death just so. Let us begin 
with what Chapter xii sets before us. , 

The long tale of controversies with the ruling powers 
in Jerusalem has ended; their ugly plan is now formed. 
He knows that well, and regards it with no fanatical in- 
sensitiveness to the impending horror (‘“‘Now is my soul 
troubled; and what shall I say? Father, save me from 
this hour’’), but first and last with the conviction which 
is all the more that of sane heroism and high reason, that 
His hideous doom is the consummation of His work. 
“The hour is come, that the Son of Man should be glori- 
fied. ... Father, save me from this hour. But for 
this cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify thy 
name.” If, as is possible, the actual scene in Chapter xi 
(from verse twenty onwards) is imaginary, the important 
fact is that our Lord’s attitude of mind, there set out in 
dramatic fashion, is precisely that which the other Gos- 
pels attribute to Him in contemplation of His death, 
from the first warning He gives the disciples to the agony 
in the Garden. 

We cannot avoid noticing how the scene is introduced. 
Our Lord learns through Philip and Andrew that certain 
Greeks wish to see Him. It is this fact on which He at 
once seizes as the augury of the immediately impending 
catastrophe and triumph. Whether this is fact or an ex- 
traordinarily felicitous stroke of drama might be doubted 
by some people and is immaterial. In the historical retro- 
spect in which we —like St. Paul, St. Luke, the nameless 
writer to the Hebrews, and the writer of our St. Matthew 
(see xxvill, 18 to 20) —can see the Crucifixion, the link of 
association between that turning point in religious his- 
tory and the first real approach of foreigners to Jesus is 
obvious; but the question is: Taking our Lord as we 
discern Him in the other Gospels, and in the light of His 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 127 


followers’ actions within a few years after His death, can 
we be sure that the drawing of all nations unto Him, the 
breaking down of “the middle wall of partition,” the de- 
struction of the ties which linked true knowledge of God 
with the ascendency of two cliques and the nationalism of 
a tribe, the casting out of the “prince of this world”’ from 
any lodgment in the innermost sphere of man’s religious 
faith, were things clearly present to His troubled soul, 
as achievements that could be wrought by His agony 
and could be wrought by nothing else? Any full answer 
would be long; but personally I cannot doubt that this 
was His clear and conscious design, and cannot doubt 
that in those dark hours it was most fully present to Him, 
linked with His care for the little flock whom He was 
leaving and through whose weakness, then most fully 
apparent, His design was to work. However this may be, 
He is represented —and beyond all reasonable doubt 
truly represented —in this passage with the foreknowl- 
edge, suddenly made full, of torture and ignominy and 
death immediately before Him, and with the resolute 
conviction that somehow this is His success. 

This leads immediately to the scene at the supper table, 
in five amazing chapters of which the keynote is at once 
given in the words: ‘When Jesus knew that his hour 
was come that he should depart out of this world unto 
the father, having loved his own which were in the world, 
he loved them unto the end.”’ It is probable indeed that 
many people who have become really familiar with the 
New Testament turn more often to the narrative in the 
other Gospels of the first Communion Service and of 
the agony in the Garden, and find the dialogues and dis- 
courses in St. John — betraying, as perhaps they do, the 
Evangelist’s own literary manner — less moving after 
awhile than such brief sentences as those in St. Luke: 


128 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


‘‘With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with 
you before I suffer’’— a desire which, it seems, was not 
(as St. Luke assumed) fulfilled; “Ye are they which 
have continued with me in my temptations’; “I am 
among you as he that serveth.”’ But it is equally prob- 
able that they have learned in large part from St. John’s 
Gospel to feel the full significance of the simpler story. 

This Evangelist does not tell again the greatest episode 
of that evening, the institution of the Eucharist, or de- 
scribe the agony in the Garden; those things were already 
well known, and he only repeats here just so much of what 
St. Mark had already told as was needed to give the full 
bearing of the conversation which he does relate. Of 
course a great deal had really passed on that evening be- 
tween the Master and the disciples besides what St. Mark 
had recounted. ‘This must have included some definite 
incidents hard to forget — as the washing of the disciples’ 
feet would have been; but the most part of it must have 
been, like so much in every real scene of which the recol- 
lection stirs our imagination, insusceptible of literal re- 
port. Looks and silences, hints and allusive words, things 
of which the record, so far as there could be any, would 
be meaningless, yet had an imperishable effect upon those 
who were there; and to their full thought thereafter not 
the least part must have been contributed by things which 
at the moment merely surprised, and of which memory 
might retain a few phrases without context or retain no 
words at all. 

In such cases, however, both poets and other writers 
may try, as this writer to a great extent had to try, to 
produce in another way what they could not produce by 
any attempt at a literal record, namely, some appreciation 
by those who were not there of the chief impressions 
received by those who were there. And when they do so 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 129 


it is often easy to say whether they have analyzed a situa- 
tion truly or drawn the main traits of a character as they 
were or as they were not. Luther, speaking of this sup- 
per, “full of friendly heart intercourse,’’ declares: “Never 
since the world began was there a more delightful meal 
than that.”” The “simple, quiet table-talk”’ which the 
scene presented to him seems to have become, in the view 
of advanced criticism, a frigid artifice for exhibiting theo- 
logical theorems. But are not the living traits of the 
man of flesh and blood there, and has the theology any 
meaning without them? 

Dr. Johnson once maintained in argument that friend- / 
ship, such as he really supremely valued, had no place in 
the system of universal benignity which Christianity 
taught. He was confuted— and gladly owned it— by a 
Quaker lady to whom he looked for support, but who 
simply referred him to the case of the beloved disciple. 
There is indeed a strange but far from rare perversion of 
the teaching that bulks largest in St. Matthew and St. 
Luke, which resolves Christianity into a diffused, loose, 
and tepid philanthropy, and sets at the head of it— asa 
sadly common type of religious picture testifies — a thin- 
blooded Christ. It is St. John’s Gospel that, with an 
amplitude and tragic iteration which had no place in the 
others, confutes this insidious debasement of our religion. 
The centre of that circle of friends and comrades, dearly 
loved and loved to the end, in which the beloved disciple 
was but one whose special attractiveness received its 
natural and uninvidious response, 1s a preéminently warm- 
blooded Being, to whose strong heart, as we are forced to 
feel, no wholesome human passion could be alien. 

The whole passage which, opening with the words 
already quoted, winds to a close with the three verses 
beginning, “Father, I will that they also whom thou hast 


130 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


given me be with me where I am,” is one which it would 
be distasteful to finger, but the chief aspect of it needs to 
be emphasized. Perhaps the writer who composed it 
was intensely theological, and theology may suggest to us 
now what is arid and pretentiously unmeaning. Perhaps, 


too, he approaches and enters a region of wrought-up 


religious sentiment which is not quite that of the rest of 
the New Testament and in which we should not feel it 
wholesome to try to dwell. But this, if it is so, does not 
do away with the fact that the circumstances in which the 
Master and the disciples must really have been placed are 
vividly conceived throughout. Read with realization of 
those circumstances, these chapters portray their great 
subject as standing in a perfect human relationship to 
the friends that He loved, clear-sighted, firm and gentle, 
with easy command and with exquisite tenderness. The 
very near prospect of death is before Him, with nothing 
lacking to its terrors, fully realized by Him, half realized 
by them, and with a preceding ordeal which He is pre- 
paring Himself to face alone. “Ye shall leave me alone 
wandsvetil an notaloness 

All the while it is not only Himself but them, whose 
work is but now to begin, that He must prepare. The 
full human painfulness of parting is there, felt for His 
own sake with the added pain that literally they will 
leave Him alone, and that spiritually they comprehend 
Him very little, and felt for their sake with the yearn- 
ing for those left behind which is the main element in 
most people’s fear of their anticipated quiet and normal 
death. But the fact is firmly seized, a perfectly simple 
fact of ordinary psychology, let it be remembered: “‘It is 
expedient for you that I go away,” for with Him there to 
lean upon they cannot possibly become possessed by the 
spirit that isin Him. He is going to demand their utmost 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 131 


of them, in the happy assurance that they do love Him; 
they will therefore keep His commandment that they love 
one another; but He makes no such overstrained de- 
mand as self-centred and exacting affection is apt to make ; 
there is no resentment in His prevision that there will be 
“no very noble or comforting demonstration of fidelity to 
Him in the hour that now impends. One even of the 
winnowed and selected little group that had sat down at 
that meal is in the plot. He has seen through him and 
with matchless human dignity of restrained reproach gets 
rid of his presence, breaking the very discourse in which 
He does so by washing his feet with those of the rest; and 
the poignant disgust of this discovery does not infuse any 
trace of false suspicion into His talk with the others. 
Most of these are men of whom nothing recorded indi- 
cates peculiar intellect or force; they were to play their 
part as the nucleus of a world-wide movement merely, as 
it seems, because they were brave men and warm-hearted 
and simple and true. They are represented here as in- 
terrupting Him merely with expressions of puzzled won- 
der as to the drift of His discourse, and He meets this 
with a patience wholly kind. He has picked out the 
great man among them, the superficially vacillating char- 
acter whom He surnamed Peter. Peter breaks in with a 
genuine protest of his sure fidelity; that is sure enough, 
but Peter will stumble badly at the first step he takes 
alone; the quick unillusioned reply tells him so, and 
instantly resumes the interrupted discourse with this sur- 
prising sequence: “The cock shall not crow until thou 
fastecenicd me thrice. ...'>| Let not- your heart’ be 
troubled.” 

This is a picture of a great human commander and a 
great human friend, in a crisis of which the nature, which 
seems to some of us stupendous and to others merely 


132 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


incomprehensible, ought not to hide from anyone its liv- 
ing analogy with the trials that men and women know. 

Into this real picture theology enters because it really 
belongs there; and it affects the whole picture in one way 
which I must indicate before passing on. Here and in 
the other Gospels our Lord has the untroubled conviction 
that He partakes without stint or limit in the eternal 
mind and being of that Father whom He feels so near. 
There is a difference, which cannot be done away, between 
the sense in which He is the Son of God and the sense 
in which He gives to all who will receive Him power 
to become the sons of God. The very words in which 
the disciples are here being taught to feel His abiding 
nearness to them after He has gone from their sight are 
words which confirm their recognition of the difference 
between Him and any of themselves or any other man of 
whom they or we have ever heard. | 

This is of course an essential part of the meaning of 
these chapters, as indeed of the whole of the New Testa- 
ment. I shall not pause here to say anything about its 
remoteness from common — and by no means specially 
modern — ways of thinking, or to ask how we are to asso- 
ciate it with what [ am next about to observe. But lam 
bound, before making the observation which I here wish 
to make, to note that this difference is absolute, and that 
it is idle to blink it, whether in studying this book or in 
any thorough consideration of Christianity in the world 
and in ourselves. Nevertheless “my Father” is “ your 
Father’; “To them gave he power to become the sons 
of God”’; and (to turn to another source) ‘‘After this 
manner ... pray ye: Our Father—~~ Thesstape 
gering distance at which Jesus Christ in this passage 
places Himself, did certainly place Himself, from all other 
of the sons of men does not in the least weaken the force 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 133 


of this further consideration: The disciples are to live 
thereafter, and all that believe through them are to live, 
as men and women governed by the presence of God who 
is their Father. Many men and women have in a great 
degree so lived and do so live. Here in the midst of the 
disciples stood a man so governed and so confronting life 
and death. And, since for the moment we are not con- 
cerned with the whole meaning of these chapters, we may 
avoid the mental strain which any intellectually honest 
consideration — on either side —of our Lord’s claim 
really exacts, and think of this figure of a great human 
commander’and friend as the figure also of one who was 
religious as man can be religious. He is intensely aware of 
God; they may beso. They pray; He prays. | 
Now we may observe that there are those for whom in 
practice conflicting claims of moral duty which baffle 
casuistry have solved themselves. Difficult questions of 
fact and of the calculation of probable consequences are 
of course before them in plenty, but they can tackle them 
and take their chance of judging them correctly, without 
the vacillation, the depression, and the fundamental in- 
consistency to which most of us are victims, and which 
spring from a conflict in our ultimate aims and in our 
basic sentiments. This is markedly the case with the 
men and women with whom we know that the thought 
of God is habitual and near, and Jesus Christ in these 
chapters is the pattern of such people. Again, in men 
and women of this sort a keen and ready sympathy for 
humankind, such as Jesus Christ exhibits throughout the 
other Gospels, combines easily with and reénforces that 
intense love for a few which in St. John’s Gospel gives to 
His personality a fuller graciousness and strength. Unlike 
most of us they experience no conflict between that 
sensitive care for those dear to them and that fearless 


134 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


maintenance of a robust individuality which here are 
the joint and harmonious marks of our Lord’s conscious- 
ness of God. 

Now this attempt of mine at characterization must be 
full of imperfections, for which the reader can and will 
make allowance. It may indeed offend him, not, I think, 
as being fanciful, but as a piece of clumsy familiarity with 
One who is already very real to his mind. But these 
chapters in particular of the Gospel do, in some such way 
as I have indicated, set before us a figure of our Lord 
which is very vivid indeed. And this figure so far is true 
to the vivid impression which we get from the other Gos- 
pels, and adds to its consistency, its compactness, and its 
force. Certainly, too, it is a most real and what is called 
“convincing” figure. One might at first wish to argue 
that such epithets should not be lightly bestowed, as if 
the congruity of the figure with some imagination of ours 
proved anything; but if we tried to represent to our- 
selves, in relation to all that we know of his times and 
can guess about himself, a literary man somewhere about, 
say, A.D. 100, constructing this figure out of our imagina- 
tion, we should find him a very unconvincing figure. 

Yet there are also elements in the Gospel according to 
St. John which jar upon many readers, because they seem 
to clash with the thoughts about Jesus Christ with which 
the other Gospels fill us or with any image of Him which 
we can conceive. As I have indicated, these discordant 
elements are chiefly to be found in the preceding section 
of the Gospel, with which I have already contrasted 
these chapters. To be exact we must notice that these 
preceding chapters, too, contain passages — notably, of 
course, that which has fixed the Good Shepherd in the 
affections of Christians ever since — which have con- 
tributed much to men’s ideas of the Lord whom they 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 135 


revere; and on the other hand that the discordance 
might be traced to some extent in the chapters which 
we have just considered, perhaps even found echoed in 
the First Epistle. The question thus arises: Are we en- 
titled to pick out what is so attractive in this Gospel and 
to say this was what the writer really knew about our 
Lord? Should we not take what is discordant in his pre- 
sentation of our Lord as proof that he was really far from 
the influence of any true remembrance of Him? 

I will set out as fully and plainly as I can the things 
in this Gospel which people do find repugnant to the view 
of Jesus Christ which they get from other sources and 
which they believe. I shall then ask what, when put at 
their highest, these things show. 

We may begin with a point at which the repugnancy 
lies in what this Gospel does not say. Reading it right 
up to the point where the imminence of death and parting 
make the human interest intense, we may well be chilled 
by the absence of practical counsel in detail. There 
is insistence upon belief, even on love, and insistence upon 
the general principle that true belief is one with right 
action: “‘If any man will do his will, he shall know of the 
doctrine”; but the sure and inspiring touch upon actual 
practice which we find elsewhere seems lacking. The 
same lack is to be noticed in St. John’s great Epistle. 
The writer reveals with extraordinary force his conviction 
that the very being of faith is bound up with action; 
theory and practice, sentiment and act seem to have no 
separate existence for his mind; yet this is in such general 
terms that the repetition of it may cease to touch us. 
When we come to what apparently is given as an account 
of our Lord’s own mission, we look for something more. 
St. Paul is polemical and doctrinal enough. His favor- 
ite doctrine, even more conspicuously than St. John’s, 


136 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


concerns the worthlessness of mere legality or living by 
a set of rules, and to such an extent that even the author 
of the wonderful phrase, “‘the perfect law of liberty,”’ was 
puzzled by him; yet even St. Paul’s most sustained dog- 
matic or controversial writing cannot close without a pro- 
fusion of counsels which move us deeply by their tender 
practicality. 

Still more must we think here of the Lord, as He walks 
and talks in the other Gospels. He, too, is no maker of 
rules, no decider of cases of conscience; He deals with the 
details of good conduct by paradox, by parable, by ques- 
tion, and by sheer verbal self-contradiction; none the 
less at every turn He is illuminating actual life in its petty 
details and searching the complex strength and weakness 
of diverse living characters. But through many a page 
of this Fourth Gospel we see Him in no such guise. 

We pass to our Lord’s actions, and are forced to wonder 
a little what has become of Him who “‘went about doing 
good.”’ It seems a strange, unhappy feat to have written 
a Gospel in which no such word as mercy, forgiveness, 
or compassion ever occurs. There are great works of 
mercy reported of Him, and looking between the lines, 
we can easily see in them the evidence of His actual com- 
passion, but the Evangelist prefers to set them in quite 
another light. To him they have become in part sym- 
bolic, but chiefly they are demonstrations of our Lord’s 
power, worked in order to compel a belief in Him — which, 
by the way, they end by not doing. Some say that the 
contrast here made is exaggerated, but on the whole this 
seems to be the express belief of this Evangelist ; and it is 
one which the other Evangelists expressly contradict. In 
them our Lord refuses to use His power for the purpose 
of impressing people; doing so is one of the temptations 
that at the beginning He set aside; works even of healing 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 137 


are not so much His proper mission as an interruption 
to it, but He must do them because He pities. Here no 
doubt there are, in connection with miracles, expressions 
of an austere, august beneficence: “My Father worketh 
hitherto and I work’”’; “I must work the works of him 
that sent me while it is day.’ These are wonderful 
words, surely spoken sometime by our Lord; but they 
are not quite the equivalents of the words, “I have com- 
passion on the multitude”’; and it is to the Jesus moved 
by this simpler and gentler motive that strong men ever 
since have bent the knee. 

Again, this Gospel and St. John’s Epistles, when com- 
pared with other Gospels and Epistles, force upon one a 
suspicion that the fire of love which glows within the 
brotherhood is limited in the range of its warmth by a very 
solid barrier that shuts out the world. At the same time, 
is not the line being drawn between believer and un- 
believer with a decision liable to dangerous fallacy, a defi- 
niteness with which our Lord did not and no other should 
dare draw it? This last question is hard to put with- 
out misleading ourselves. A real brotherhood must in 
some way be separate; its principles have a definite 
meaning, and they are or are not accepted. Life is full 
of occasions when a man must be for something or against 
it, and perhaps the worst type of avoidance in God’s eyes 
is that which on a famous occasion adopted the formula 
of “neutrality even in thought.” For ourselves “we 
must be severe with ourselves,” having no indecision in 
our choice of a way of life, and in matters of belief, when 
we have some real light, avoiding that mere laziness of 
judgment which may pass for liberality. The difficulty 
which arises is in regard to severity toward others. For 
this writer and his teacher it had become, we have reason 
to think, a necessary task to prevent their community 


138 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


from being merged in surrounding masses, and its be- 
lief, which must be emphatic or nothing, from fading 
out amid a chaos of loose, fantastic ideas. So it is not 
surprising that we miss here certain notes which sound 
loudly elsewhere in the New Testament; only, in missing 
them we miss what we believe to have been the accents 
of our Lord. Take St. Peter’s splendid summary of duty: 
“Honor all men; love the brotherhood; fear God; honor 
the king.” Half of that is repeated loud and clear in this 
Gospel and the Epistle; upon the other half there is 
silence. Nay, even in the marvelous Chapter xvii of the 
Gospel there come, as from our Lord’s own lips, the words, 
“T pray not for the world.”’ Put in the abstract, the 
question between “the world’— a term which may stand 
for a very real and very evil force — and that which should 
detach us in this sense from the world, is most difficult to 
discuss; for those (or him) who wrote this Gospel and 
Epistle we may suppose that the difficulty was a practical 
one. But other writers in the New Testament manage 
to convey a spirit which moves above the difficulty. 
“Brethren” and ‘‘the brotherhood”’ are indeed names for 
a special society, but the Fatherhood of God is more in- 
clusive, and the motive to be perfect as He is perfect 
covers all human relations. As for our Lord Himself, we 
know well how He treated limitations of sympathy; the 
question “*Who is my neighbor?” was left forever un- 
answered, but the spirit in which the question was thrust 
at Him met with the most famous counter ever dealt by 
His quick sword. 

To carry this point a little further, we must briefly 
notice that our Lord in the other Gospels is very dis- 
couraging to any feeling of being saved or of belonging to 
a saved community of those who can say, with St. John, 
““Now are we the sons of God.” To the question, “Are 


i 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 139 


there few that shall be saved ?”’ the answer is in effect, 
“Doi not assume that’ you are so.’ ' True,’ He calls to 
special tasks chosen servants who are bidden — which is 
in actual effect no discouragement — to think themselves 
“unprofitable servants”; but around them and around 
Him we see a host of people who come into contact with 
Him, and whom that contact blesses (“Thy sins be for- 
given thee’’), but who are not called to be disciples or 
definite adherents, or who are even told not to be disciples. 
This elasticity — for want of a better word — belongs 
to a time when not a Church but a small band who 
are to found one is being formed; yet it is remarkable 
how little the sympathies of the greatest missionary of the 
Church, when founded, had become restricted. If we find 
no positive sign of such vitality of human sympathy 
here, it means perhaps that the writer was a divine rather 
than a missionary. The point here is not to find fault 
with him, but to notice a further trait of our Lord, as we 
see Him elsewhere, which is not to be found here. 

But there is more tocome. The Jesus of the other Gos- 
pels is meek and, above all, forgiving. Is He so here, 
and has the Evangelist himself acquired Histemper? For 
all His strength and sternness our Lord can say, “I am 
meek and lowly in heart”; and St. Matthew’s most tell- 
ing citation of prophecy declares that ‘‘He shall not strive 
nor cry, neither shall his voice be heard in the streets,” 
nor can we doubt that this expresses some characteristic 
of His bearing. But in this Gospel His voice is heard in 
continual angry contest. It has been said: “Probably 
the Jews did wrangle so.” Precisely. That is just why 
this Jew writer writes so; but did the Jew of whom he 
writes wrangle so? It is true that in the Synoptic Gos- 
pels He can be angry, very angry, for example when the 
disciples would have kept back mothers from troubling 


140 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Him with their little children. True that in those Gos- 
pels He denounces scribes and Pharisees with vigorous 
wealth of denunciation. But this is a manly anger. 
“Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites .. . 
therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation”; but 
why? Not because they rejected His claim, but because 
they taught that cheating formula of “Corban”’ ; because 
“‘ve bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay 
them on men’s shoulders”’ ; because “ye have taken away 
the key of knowledge; ye entered not in yourselves, and 
_ them that were entering in ye hindered.” In that de- 
lightful country in which habitual readers of Matthew, 
Mark, and Luke may walk, the thunder sometimes peals, 
and it can strike real terror. It is the sound of doom to cer- 
tain folk, the unpitying and the unforgiving. Accordingly 
it is written: ““They crucified him. . . . Then said Jesus, 
Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” 
And His servants in the Acts speak no word of vengeance ; 
not for themselves, not even for Him. Strange that no 
echo of this wonderful note which sounds throughout the 
story is heard when we read the Fourth Gospel. The 
very design of this book is fraught with the writer’s anger. 
Peter and Stephen and Paul, in following Christ, had 
made Christ’s note their own. “‘And now, brethren,” 
says St. Peter, in the Acts, “I wot that through ignorance 
ye did it, as did also your rulers.” This Evangelist has 
consecrated half his book to showing that it was not 
through ignorance; it is as if his bitter retrospect made 
him cry: ‘‘Ne leur pardonne pas; car ils savent ce qu’ils 
font.” This bitterness of judgment against the nation 
of his kindred is imported by him into the speeches of 
Jesus. Along with it there is no doubt in these speeches 
a certain pathos. Jesus, pleading ever more insistently 
for His right against adversaries who become ever more 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL I4I 


implacable, is made to speak as a good man might who felt 
himself brought helplessly up against the really hard ele- 
ment in mankind. But if we hesitate to ascribe to Jesus 
the note of personal bitterness, we shall hesitate equally 
to ascribe to Him that of self-pity: “Daughters of Jeru- 
salem, weep not for me.” ‘Twice we are told that, with 
eyes unused as we may be sure to the melting mood, 
“Jesus wept.” The one occasion is told of by the Fourth 
Evangelist in a passage which deals with our Lord’s rela- 
tions with His friends; He wept for the death of a friend. 
The other occasion was as follows. Jesus was coming up 
to the feast in full contemplation of His own doom, and 
He turned acorner of the road. “And when he was come 
near he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou 
hadst known —” 

His tears were for the doomed city of His race. And 
this, with one other speech of equally tender sorrow, is the 
principal reference in the other Gospels to that very topic 
of the rejection which the Fourth Evangelist made one 
of his two chief topics and handled as has just been said. 

There remains, however, a point in which the conflict 
between our authorities seems to be far sharper. In this 
Gospel our Lord begins to publish His own personal claim 
from the very first. From the first He confronts the 
Jewish people with challenging statements of that claim; 
He works miracles expressly to demonstrate it; to deny 
the claim so demonstrated is sin—the sin. It is, at the 
latest, considerably before His last visit to Jerusalem, and 
of course His trial, that the claim has been very definitely 
expressed in its fullest scope and height, and in its most 
provocative form. The story in St. Matthew, St. Mark, 
and St. Luke differs from this all along the line by insisting 
that He positively forbade any sort of publication of the 
claim that He was the Son of God. We may note at once 


142 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


one further very marked contradiction of an idea that is 
most prominent in St. John’s Gospel. No sort of gain- 
saying of Christ’s personal attributes could, according to 
the other Gospels, be His ground of quarrel with any man. 
Whatever may be—and we can guess it quite sufficiently — 
thecharacteroftheunforgivablesin, “Whosoevershallspeak 
a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him.” 

There is for some people a haunting interest, though 
an idle one, in the question of how our Lord’s own under- 
standing of Himself grew, as His own growth in wisdom 
and in mental “‘stature’’ came to fullness, under the dis- 
cipline of the appointed task now at last in progress, 
varied by those intervals of solitary thought and prayer, 
and with the change which had to come over the scope 
and aim of His effort. However that may be, in the 
Synoptic Gospels He came “preaching the Gospel of the 
kingdom of God,” not then a novel phrase, and one as to 
which the change which He set Himself to work in its 
popular meaning, a change decided from the first but 
gradual in operation, is familiar enough to us. Power 
and authority Christ does claim— or rather, He uses 
them. He is appointed to do a certain work, and His 
total absence of hesitation or diffidence in taking to Him- 
self with the full magnitude of the work the full necessary 
authority is one of the most indubitable features of His 
character. But the business in hand is the Kingdom — 
not Himself. There is here the whole difference which 
again and again in history has distinguished the man who 
leads and governs from the man interested in obtaining 
due acknowledgment of his right to govern. He could 
have easily aroused a movement to make Him a king, and 
we are led to suppose, by the narrative of the Temptation, 
that He felt within Himself the genius that might have 
given lustre to the kingship. That kingship of course He 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 143 


would not have. Nevertheless there was a place of pre- 
eminence recognized in current Jewish ideas, which He 
not only would accept but implicitly claimed, with a de- 
sign of the future which He was prepared to accept if He 
could strip the Jewish term, “ Messiah,”’ of all associations 
with earthly kingship and stamp upon it a new meaning 
of His own. 

The Jews, in the Law and the Prophets so “fulfilled”’ 
as He has come to fulfill them, possessed as a national 
treasure the one pure and popular religion, spiritual and 
with practical driving force, intellectually unemasculated, 
intimate in its appeal, universal in its scope of membership, 
which was fitted to be the religion of mankind. His 
mission at the outset was significantly limited to the 
nation which professed that religion, but among them it 
was by no means limited to the instruction of selected 
disciples; His teaching seems to have been just as wide- 
cast as was consistent with not spending His all for a 
superficial effect. The first aim of the mission was cer- 
tainly to awaken His people genuinely and generally to 
the full meaning of this religion of their own. Purified 
and rekindled, that religion would cease to be their exclu- 
sive own, but its passing to be the world’s religion would 
be their real and foretold and only possible national glory. 
Therefore His aim came into sharp collision with the 
actual aims of Jewish nationalism. Those aims, however 
hard to relinquish, could in any case only lead to destruc- 
tion. He appears to have seen this fact clearly, and to have 
contemplated with contentment that such aims should be 
hopeless, yet with the agony of a patriot at the predict- 
able horror which their failure involved. His aim came 
into still sharper collision with the class interests of the 
influential sect and the powerful caste which, though offi- 
cially at variance, combined to form the nucleus of Jewish 


144 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


nationalism. In this collision He was bound to go under, 
in the usual course of the world’s affairs. In the early 
days there seems to have been no illusion in His evident 
happiness; “The days will come. ...” Buta distinct 
time of crisis came, in the midst of which these Gospels 
set the vision on the Mount of Transfiguration. The fate 
upon which He might be rushing, yet need not have 
rushed, was in His clear contemplation. In that fate He 
saw the real triumph of His adventure, and a stupendous 
prospect of that which He was really doing lay before 
Him. It was at this time that He elicited from His fol- 
lowers the belief as to Himself which by then had dawned 
on their minds. And immediately thereupon He told 
them of the death, so unfitted to their expectations, which 
He was soon to die. 

Here, in any case, is the quite clear-cut sequence of facts, 
as St. Mark conceived them, concerning His declaration of 
- Himself whether as the Messiah or as the Son of God. 
From an early moment His character is recognized by 
some others. ‘The devils proclaim Him Son of God and 
are bidden to be muzzled. Right through to the end 
proclamations of Him, of a sort more intelligible to us, 
in that or any other capacity are steadily checked by Him 
so far as possible. When in close intimacy the disciples 
own Him Son of God, He neither rejects nor accepts that 
title, so far as we are told, but enjoins silence. At last 
He stands before that council which wishes His death but 
must find some evidence of a charge that will justify it 
in its own eyes for demanding His death of Pilate — of 
course, on some other charge. Many men have stood in 
similar peril and have escaped. False witnesses were 
brought against Him and did not help their side. He was 
questioned Himself and kept absolute silence. At last 
the direct question was asked Him, whether He was the 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 145 


Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the blessed. What if 
He had continued silent? What if, as at other times He | 
had delighted to do, He had used in some confounding 
manner His unrivaled mastery of wordplay? But the 
claim which He would not utter to glorify Himself He 
would not falsify in fear of shame and agony. Then and 
then only, as this simple chronicler takes it, did Jesus 
avow Himself to be the Messiah, the Christ. This is the 
Jesus whom men worship. 

Nothing in St. John’s Gospel can discredit substantially 
this story, which describes in so distinct and impressive 
a manner how our Lord gradually unfolded His nature 
to those who had long continued to follow Him. There 
were reasons for the reticence of it, to which I shall return 
later, which are plain enough to us; but there was nothing 
to make His disciples invent it all long afterward, when 
they were preaching Him as Christ and Son of God. The 
discourses in question in this Gospel, on the other hand, 
are of such a kind that as they stand they could have been 
addressed to no audience — however different from the 
Galilean audience — by anyone who wished to persuade, 
least of all by one whom we see elsewhere to have been a 
master of such speech as would move the hearts and touch 
the innermost recesses in the minds of those with whom 
He was immediately dealing. But they abound in lan- 
guage which was full of power and beauty to believers in 
Him afterward, and we may well suppose the Evangelist 
to have been influenced by this when he composed these 


chapters. 


1St. Matthew does not, like St. Mark, make Him say, “I am,” but, “Thou hast 
said it.” This, I gather, was not a phrase equivalent to “Yes,” but as ordinarily used 
would suggest rather, “You may say so if you like.”’ Considering the different senses 
that might be put on the terms of the high priest’s question and particularly on the 
term, “Christ” (“Messiah’’), it is not inconceivable that our Lord used this guarded 
phrase. But this does not affect what I have said; for the phrase was in itself a refusal 
to treat the charge now made against Him as untrue, and it was immediately followed 
by words which so interpreted it as necessarily to cause His condemnation. 


146 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Thus, so far as the Fourth Gospel here gives an impres- 
sion which we cannot reconcile with the others, we cannot 
treat it as an historical authority. But this is not quite 
a sufficient account of this difficult matter. For we must 
not take its writer as professing at all to give a full account 
of our Lord’s intercourse with the Jews in Jerusalem. If 
his teacher or even if he himself was present as a young 
man in Jerusalem, then his capacity to do that would 
have been slight, and that is evidently not what he wishes 
to do. He aims, we can see, at relating scenes in which 
our Lord appeals emphatically to the Jews and is emphati- 
cally rejected; and beyond imparting to these passages 
his own indignation at that rejection, he has the further 
aim of making our Lord’s appeal full of teaching for those 
who are now to read it. Scenes so written may give a false 
historical impression, but it does not follow that there is 
no kernel of history in them. 

We cannot enter into the minds of those who confronted 
our Lord in Jerusalem or guess how He would deal with 
them, though we can more or less put ourselves in the 
position of the peasants who listened to Him on the moun- 
tain or the plain, and feel with the disciples who were 
with Him at the Last Supper. But we know quite enough 
to be sure that His method among the leaders of the Jews 
was other than His method with these humbler folk, 
though doubtless in its aim as gentle. Here were learned 
men of inquiring mind to whom He may well have 
uttered sentences pregnant with meaning, to challenge 
thought which might be fruitful later. Here, too, were 
important persons with no disposition to inquire, to whom 
He could only take a challenging tone, giving pause to 
some by its very confidence and conveying a meaning 
which might be plain long afterward. And we must ob- 
serve that in these chapters He is only once said to have 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 147 


spoken of Himself as the Messiah and then only indi- 
rectly ; whereas it is probably this title above all others 
which in the Synoptic Gospels He is so long unwilling to 
claim. Now to claim that title was to court premature 
death or public disorder and hopeless misunderstand- 
ing of His mission, while possibly the fullest assertion 
of His unity with the Father would at the worst move 
some people to deride Him. 

Lastly, these chapters of the Gospel abound in sayings 
which must strike us as having the ring of Jesus Christ 
and not of a romancer about Him. Two conclusions re- 
sult from this: first, the discrepancy in this between the 
Fourth Gospel and our other authorities relates to man- 
ner, tone, and circumstances, but not at all so clearly to 
the substance of the things said. Secondly, it seems 
probable that here also this writer had historical data. 

What conclusions should now be drawn from the ways 
in which this Gospel falls short, or seems to do so, of pre- 
senting to us our Lord as we can believe Him to have 
been? 

To begin with, let us be quit of demanding that one 
Evangelist or one Apostle should have been able com- 
pletely to deliver Christ’s message or to reflect His life. 
To Christians, at any rate, it is part of the wonder and 
delight of the New Testament that the message comes to 
them in it through many imperfect human instruments. 
Through their remarkable diversity and their lovable 
human limitations the greatness of their Master is known. 
I think that the features attributed to this Gospel as de- 
fects are in large part really present and in large part 
really defects. I have certainly not tried to belittle them ; 
I have suggested that they affect in some degree every 
part of the Gospel, and the Epistles of St. John as well. 
But I think they will raise no doubt of the historical truth 


148 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


of what is most important in the book, if we recall its 
character and purpose and the temper and circumstances 
of the writer, about which also some things are plain. 

The book, as already said, is a highly artistic composi- 
tion, designed to emphasize in every possible way certain 
aspects of our Lord’s life, and the very thoroughness with 
which this design is carried out required the exclusion of 
much which would have appeared in a simpler telling of 
the tale, however brief. The primary subject of the writer 
is manifestly the fullness with which God was revealed in 
that person whom the writer of the First Epistle speaks 
of handling and in whom he “beheld”’ the whole of that 
revelation; and this subject carries with it inseparably 
that insistence upon what Jesus Christ was to those who 
did receive Him, which gives to the one scene where He 
is alone with His disciples its incomparable power. Yet, 
as the author himself leads us in his first verses to expect, 
this scene is to be set against the background of the Jews’ 
rejection of the Christ—a subject which could not be 
handled with the same sympathy or with the same fullness 
of understanding, and in his presentation of which the 
most authentic element was likely to be those thoughts 
of Jesus about Himself which his disciples did ultimately 
grasp. These two portions of the book were necessarily 
of unequal value. 

We have noticed also, in the matter of actions and 
events, a reason for large omissions in the story in the 
fact that the author assumes another book to be known 
to his readers. We cannot tell that he knew St. Matthew 
and St. Luke besides St. Mark, but it is incredible that 
he did not know an important mass of teaching, handed 
on orally at first and recorded in some writing before those 
Evangelists wrote, which they incorporated and which 
forms the staple of our knowledge of that teaching. He 


OUR LORD IN THIS GOSPEL 149 


must have assumed this, too, to be known to his readers. 
Certainly also we find in his own teacher — or in himself 
— who wrote the First Epistle'a most remarkable deter- 
mination to concentrate all moral teaching into the one 
precept of love among the brethren. These considerations 
go far to explain the absence of much that we miss in this 
Gospel. 

Tradition tells us that St. John and his school had to 
combat a strange heresy (anyway false) which indeed 
dissolved Jesus Christ, by making Him through a part of 
his life no man, and through the rest no Son of God; and 
the writer of the Epistle is evidently in conflict with some 
new doctrine. We are aware also of signs that the rela- 
tions between Christian Jews and others were becoming 
in some cases bitter, in others conciliatory in a fashion 
which might swamp Christian belief; and this, of course, 
added point to the subject of the rejection. 

And St. John is recorded — and appears in his Epistles 
— to have been a man whose devotion to our Lord’s per- 
son was intimate, passionate, and fierce. This Evangel- 
ist, whoever he was, was of like temper. No rebukes 
aimed in his pages at the Jewish rulers need astonish us; 
we do best perhaps to take some of them to ourselves. 

It is obvious to what these considerations lead us, and 
I do not wish to follow up further a clue to the study 
of this Gospel, which I had rather leave for some reader 
of mine to use himself. But, however modestly, one is 
bound to apply to such questions as this whatever knowl- 
edge of literature and of history one may have. Attempt- 
ing to do so, I am forced to feel that wider consideration 
of this Gospel makes the historical worth of the scene at 
the Last Supper all the more certain. I have no doubt 
that in that scene we see the true lineaments of our Lord. 


xX 
A FURTHER TEST OF OUR RESULT REQUIRED 


THE conclusion which I just stated necessarily implies 
that our Lord Himself held that view of His own being and 
His own relation to the Father which is set forth in the 
First Epistle of St. John, and which the Church later 
endeavored to formulate more precisely in its Creeds. For 
the words expressing that view of Him which are put 
into our Lord’s own mouth in the dialogue at the Last 
Supper are vital to the whole tenor and purpose of His 
discourse there, and if He did not speak of Himself sub- 
stantially so, that dialogue as a whole is historically 
worthless. But it is now laid down by many people 
that our Lord cannot have spoken so; since, it is said, the 
belief about Him which the words ascribed to Him express 
formed no part of what the Apostles originally preached, 
and thus, though it did develop during Apostolic times, 
it must have been formed by influences which were alien 
to His teaching. 

This fundamental objection to my conclusion must 
be fairly met, though in trying to do so I must through 
several chapters leave the Gospel according to St. John 
out of sight. Some development certainly did come over 
the belief of the Apostles about our Lord after He had 
left them. The question is whether that development 
was due to any other influence than their gradually 


BUNEOER VEST OF OURVRESUL Di rst 


growing understanding of Him and of what He had 
actually taught. 

The fact that there was a change in the early Church’s 
view of its Founder, and the reasonableness of asking 
what caused it, are easily brought home to us. Let us 
turn to the speeches of St. Peter in the early chapters 
of the Acts; a single quotation is enough to illustrate 
their doctrine, and it does not matter here whether 
the author of the book had, as he may well have had, 
actual records or memories of these speeches at com- 
mand, or merely composed them in the light of what 
was generally remembered in his time as the primitive 
message of the Apostles. “‘Therefore,”’ says St. Peter 
in his first address to the Jews, “let all the house of 
Israel know assuredly that God hath made him both Lord 
and Christ, this Jesus whom ye crucified.”’ Let us com- 
pare this with some of the words ascribed to our Lord in 
the great discourse of the Fourth Gospel: ‘He that 
hath seen me hath seen the Father. . . . | am in the 
Father and the Father in me. . . . | came out from the 
Father and am come into the world: again I leave the 
world and go unto the Father. . . . And now, Father, 
glorify thou me . . . with the glory which I had with 
thee before the world was.’’ Something is said in these 
words of which St. Peter’s give us no suggestion. There 
may be no real conflict, but a different range of ideas is 
calledup. St. Peter speaks the language of a Jew who has 
been expecting the Jewish Christ or Messiah and who is 
appealing to the Jews of his time. Our Lord, if He used 
words like these (or, if He did not, then the writer who 

imputed them to Him), speaks a language which has 
appealed to men of other races and to men in all ages 
since. 

We are here forced to think of St. Paul, the chief author 


152 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


of that revolution by which the Church ceased to be a 
sect within the Jewish national Church and became the 
organ of a religion for the world. In more than one way 
his mission led him to develop or define afresh the faith 
which he preached, a faith to which he was surprisingly 
converted, in a Christ whom he had never seen except, 
as he believed, in a vision. It is a natural conjecture 
that he and the whole Church after him unconsciously 
took over into their creed ideas which they really derived 
from the very people among whom they looked for con- 
verts. Men who changed other men’s minds on so largea 
scale and so profoundly must have been receptive in turn, 
perhaps in some ways more than they knew. May not 
the Christ whom they had known or heard of have 
become in their minds a somewhat different figure as 
they came to preach Him to other nations? And con- 
jecture once so started cannot stop here. It may seem 
unlikely that the Apostles after the great Pentecost 
should have ascribed to their Master lesser attributes 
than He Himself had claimed, but it does not seem at 
all unlikely that they should have ascribed to Him 
greater attributes. They, like St. Paul a little later, 
dwelt amid ideas which they might annex to the name 
of Jesus. And if we turn to the first three Gospels and 
find that our Lord’s words about Himself there — though 
for some reason they may startle us less —imply no 
smaller claim to allegiance than those in St. John, is the 
ground firm under our feet? ‘These books too were 
written at a time later than some, or very likely than 
any, of St. Paul’s Epistles, and it may be asked how far 
what they tell of our Lord and His teaching has been 
colored by influences other than His. In short, it may be 
suggested that, from the very moment when His disciples 
became convinced that He had risen, a process was at 


gs 


Pharos OR TOU RARE OU Eo (p4n53 


work by which the true outlines of His person and His 
doctrine were transformed. For Christianity sprang up 
in a world teeming with religious ideas and movements 
more varied, more vigorous, and in some respects more 
interesting than most of us imagine. The reaction of 
this environment upon it demands attention from any 
point of view; and it demands it the more because 
research has lately accumulated much fresh knowledge 
about this environment, emphasizing many startling 
similarities between pagan thought and ways and those 
which we may have imagined were exclusively Christian. 

In the following chapters I shall attempt to take stock 
of the most important elements (for our purpose) in the 
Jewish thought and tradition from which Christianity 
sprang, and in that world of pagan thought and religion 
into which the Church so soon plunged. I shall examine 
the principal points in which many critics believe that 
Christian doctrine was drawn from other sources than 
Christ ; and I shall indicate the lines of that actual devel- 
opment of Christian thought of which, as it seems to me, 
the story is plain upon the face of the New Testament. 
The answer to the objection which I have to meet will be 
plain enough. I should wish, beyond answering it, to 
show the place of this Gospel in that greater whole, the 
New Testament. 

At the outset we should beware of a fallacy that in- 
clines us to look for influences upon the early Christians 
which were foreign to our Lord’s teaching, merely because 
there was some change in the form of their doctrine or in 
the terms in which they spoke of Him. The fallacy con- 
sists in supposing that the essence of Christianity lies in 
its doctrinal formulas. Christianity from the beginning 
and ever since has consisted in a reverence, a love, a hope, 
a spirit animating all conduct, which were at first and are 


154 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


sometimes now compatible with very crude and insuf- 
ficient ways of expressing why men care about Christ or 
what precisely that name signifies. ‘This is not the less 
true because it became necessary for the Church to for- 
mulate its doctrine more precisely as time went on. It 
did become necessary, for the purpose of guarding, against 
vicious influences which tended to pervert and enfeeble it, 
a simple piety which had existed before any adequate 
definition of its principles could have been framed. 
Whatever we may conceive our Lord’s mission to have 
been, it was not primarily to proclaim some abstract 
theory about Himself. ‘The original Church consisted of 
a little company of men who had lived with Him, loved 
Him, been taught and led by Him. When their attach- 
ment to Him had become complete, their hopes were 
suddenly shattered by an overwhelming calamity, and 
then — however we may conceive it to have happened — 
as suddenly restored by a conviction that He had risen 
and that He lived, though unseen, to be their Master 
for evermore. When they had to proclaim their con- 
viction to the crowd and to the rulers of Jerusalem who 
had killed Him, they used, of course, the words that came 
readiest to them and that might appeal most directly to 
those whom they addressed. It belonged to the very 
nature of the case that these words were not the words 
in which their fullest reflection on His teaching and on His 
enduring significance to themselves and to the world 
would ultimately express itself. It is not in the abstract 
impossible that ideas about Him quite remote from His 
real teaching should have become implanted in their 
minds; but if they were governed by His influence alone, 
it would be equally inevitable that their thought, slowly 
ripening with the progress of their own mission, should 
set Him in a different light from that in which they saw 





BURBS TEST OF/OURTRE SUL?) trys 


Him in the first days; inevitable, moreover, that words 
of His, unheeded because not understood when they 
were spoken, should in after times come to their remem- 
brance, just as this Evangelist — surely not with cun- 
ning falsehood — says that our Lord foretold. 

In considering any possible way in which the growth 
of their belief may have been affected, it should never be 
forgotten that these men believed all the while that 
Jesus Christ had risen from the dead. Critics who them- 
selves do not believe in His resurrection often seem to 
forget that the Apostles did believe it. But the rapid 
spread, soon after His death, of a sincere and passionate 
conviction that He had risen is one of the most incon- 
testable facts in history. We shall find, I think, that 
some prevalent theories about the origin of Christian 
doctrine owe their plausibility largely to the ignoring of 
this fact. | 

It will save a tiresome interruption of the argument 
later if something is here said about the reliance which 
we may place upon those books of the New Testament 
to which we must refer. Of course the earliest Christian 
documents which we possess in their original form are 
Epistles, not Gospels. St. Matthew and St. Luke are 
relatively later works, in which earlier-written material 
has passed under the revising hand of an editor — per- 
haps more than one such hand; nor need we question 
the current opinion that even St. Mark has been edited. 
Glosses on our Lord’s words and sayings mistakenly 
referred to His authority might, it would seem, be often 
present in such books. Some such glosses can be pointed 
out with a fair amount of certainty; perhaps the clearest 
example is the qualification in St. Matthew of the pro- 
hibition of divorce given in St. Mark. It would be easy 
to point out a number of texts about which the conjecture 


156 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


that they have crept in more or less in the same fashion 
is by no means unreasonable. 

Now these facts certainly do impose one obligation on 
us in the use which, in a later chapter, must be made of 
the Fourth Gospel. That obligation is: to base our con- 
clusions as little as possible upon any isolated saying of a 
sort that could reasonably be supposed not to be genuine, 
and to base them as much as possible upon the sustained 
tenor of whole passages and the combined authority of 
many diverse sayings. If later on I should appear to 
rest undue weight upon some single text, it will be to 
avoid prolixity and with the conviction that the same 
result could be reached with more obvious regard to this 
principle. Of course there are many striking single 
sayings of which no sensible critic has ever doubted the 
genuineness, because it is evident that they could never 
have been invented. 

But it would be quite ridiculous to suppose, merely 
upon the ground just mentioned, that we need more than 
this very simple caution in referring to the Gospels for 
our Lord’s teaching. We know that He was a great 
teacher, who gave His teaching often in a very easily 
remembered form; and it is quite impossible to suppose 
that the Church did not from very early days treasure 
the memory of His teaching. If we take a number of 
texts and say that any one of these may conceivably have 
been inserted in error, this would be a long way from 
implying that the whole number are likely to have been 
so inserted. Before we could say that, we should have 
to suppose some principle upon which such wholesale 
perversion of the record was carried on. There is a sort 
of loose, unthinking criticism which delights to reject 
passages of the Gospels arbitrarily. To that a very 
simple answer is enough. We must not talk as if the 


—-_— 


PORE R LEST OF OUR BRHSUIEE jas? 


whole record could be one huge interpolation into 
itself. 

The destructive criticism of the Gospels that does 
claim some serious regard tries to distinguish a definite 
element in them which represents our Lord’s real teach- 
ing, and an equally definite element which, owing to some 
tendency of early Christian thought, was grafted on to 
the original element. Attempts of this kind have been 
made by a great many scholars with immense industry 
and ingenuity, for many years gone by. It may seem a 
little rash to dispose in a few sentences of this mass of 
learned and earnest labor, and yet this can now be done. 
It would not be enough to say of the radical critics that 
their various conjectures are of the most conflicting kind, 
with no apparent tendency toward agreement among 
them, for many a sound process of discovery has passed 
through a similar stage; but we can go much beyond 
this. Roughly speaking, two opposite ways of breaking 
up the Gospels into authentic and unauthentic teaching 
have presented themselves, and the course of discussion 
upon them makes it now manifest that both are liable to 
the same fatal objection. 

There are those who think our Lord was simply a 
teacher of pure ethical precepts and a lofty piety and 
did not concern Himself with what is called eschatology. 
All that we find in the Gospels about impending judg- 
ment, about His coming again, and the like, is— upon 
this view— derived from a stock of ideas which had 
much currency among the Jews, especially, it is sometimes 
said, in Galilee, and which the Apostles in their fervor 
blended with the thought of their risen Lord. I may 
say at once that there is in my belief a little truth under- 
lying this view. The early Church did, as I conjecture, 
misunderstand certain sayings of His about things to 


158 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


come, and our record of those sayings shows the marks 
of that misunderstanding. I shall return to this point 
later; but for the moment we are concerned only with a 
view which rejects altogether His reputed references to 
things to come. Certain scholars, on the contrary, think 
of Him as a fantastic visionary whose whole mind was 
full of an immediately impending end of the world and of 
the part which He was to play in it. Upon this view, 
though He i is supposed to have laid down some rules of 

“interim” ethics, the permanent ethical value of the 
Gospel teaching is due to the reflections of His disciples 
after Him. 

These two types of theory have been before the schol- 
arly world in various forms long enough for a fact which 
any attentive and sympathetic reader might discover for 
himself to have become more than ever apparent. ‘The 
ethical and the eschatological elements of the teaching in 
the Gospels are really inseparable. In passage after pas- 
sage we find the characteristic moral teaching of the Gos- 
pels so blended with the thoughts of another world than 
this, and of things to come, and of our Lord’s relation 
thereto, that, however difficult it may be to interpret 
these latter, they do manifestly form one single whole 
of thought with His simplest moral precepts. To sep- 
arate the two a critic has to leave out of the Gospels what 
is in them and to read into them what is not, just as suits 
his own convenience, and far beyond any extent which 
common sense will allow him. 

The reader need not at once take for granted so 
summary a statement of the case. But while there are 
several speculations of “advanced” criticism over which 
we shall have to spend some time, there is no very sub- 
versive theory dealing with this particular matter of the 
construction of the Synoptic Gospels over which we need 


FURTHER TEST OF OUR RESULT 159 


linger. If we find later that there does emerge from their 
general tenor a clear and consistent view of our Lord’s 
teaching which sufficiently explains what the Apostles 
taught after Him, we may accept that view without 
suspicion. 

Meanwhile, for the purpose of the present argument we 
are not to assume the Gospel according to St. John is 
an historical authority, except, of course, so far as it and 
the other Johannine books prove that when they were 
written certain tendencies of thought had arisen in the 
Christian Church. But in thus parting company with 
it for a time, we may note one point. It can no longer be 
thought safe to make the contrary assumption, that it is 
not an historical authority concerning our Lord. Much 
speculation about the origins of Christian doctrine goes 
on its way in disregard of this Gospel, as if one or another 
of the radical theories to account for it really did hold 
the field among reasonable critics who look into the mat- 
ter. But this is very far from being the case. 

I turn now to that Jewish religion in which Christianity 
had its roots. The whole problem before us is really to 
see more clearly how a teaching originally addressed to 
Jews in Jewish terms passed into a form in which it could 
appeal to the world. 


XI 
THE JEWISH BACKGROUND OF CHRISTIANITY 


Every scholar should be well aware that Christianity was, 
in an important sense, no new religion at all. It was and 
it expressly claimed to be a development of Judaism. It 
is one of the two strongly contrasting forms in which 
Judaism now survives. Now Jewish religious thought 
did not, as we may be apt to think, stand still between the 
completion of the Old Testament and the advent of our 
Lord, though, outside the well-known Apocrypha, the 
literature from which we may infer its changes has not 
demanded general attention. The remnant of Israel 
that returned from Babylon stereotyped their worship 
and codified their laws. Having done this, as they 
believed, under God’s guidance, they concluded before 
long that the Spirit of God had nothing further to say 
through the mouths of prophets. Finally, to the great 
advantage of the Christian Church, which kept in this 
respect to their tradition, those of them at least who lived 
in Palestine closed the canon of their authoritative books, 
and gave the Old Testament as we know it the position 
apart which — subject to the similar formation of a New 
Testament later—it has held ever since. The rigidly 
formulated system of observances which governed the 
Jews before Christ is, I suppose, repellent to most of us. 
To what was vital and best in it the prophets of the Old 
Testament and the spirit which in the main informs the 





THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 161 


Old Testament had given such expression as we hardly 
desire to see, and certainly do not anywhere see, surpassed. 
Subject to a possible allowance for some favorite passages 
in the Apocrypha, the Jewish literature of later centuries 
is no more comparable with the Old Testament than 
certain of the Christian Fathers are with the New Tes- 
tament. Nevertheless, in those dull centuries the warfare 
of the prophets may be said to have been achieving its 
best results. In their own days they had done battle, 
with uncertain issue, against the forces of surrounding 
idolatry, whose myths and rites evermore attracted the 
people of Israel, perhaps in proportion as the religion 
which was distinctively their own kept that beauty of 
freshness and spontaneity which now charms us. The 
victory which had now been won had manifest draw- 
backs, like other victories, but it was a victory. There 
existed as a fact and not merely as an ideal a community 
of men bound together by the closest of the ties which 
enter into nationality, who acknowledged themselves 
consecrated, each and all, to the serving of one God. He 
was an unseen God; He was righteous; He was the God 
of the whole earth and of the whole heavens, but He was 
their own God still, and He was a living God. His wor- 
ship was clean. He claimed of them an allegiance such 
as no earthly monarch ever claimed, to be rendered not 
only by exact ceremonial but by every labor of the hand 
and every thought of the heart. Inside the hard shell 
of a formalism and exclusiveness so repugnant to us, an 
exalted and yet full-blooded monotheism was maturing 
the quality and gathering the strength with which there- 
after it was to invade the world.! 


1 Tn the above paragraph | have repeatedly been echoing the magnificent conclusion 
of Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels. I hope I may claim also to have 
gained something in writing it from the circumstance that the day before doing so I 
finished reading Dr. Gore’s The Holy Spirit in the Church. 


162 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


One marked result of the development which then took 
place in current thought was that belief in the resurrection 
of the dead became general and strong, though the par- 
ticular sect to which the chief priests belonged set itself 
against it. Whether at first it was to be only a resur- 
rection of the just, or whether just and unjust were to 
arise and meet their different dooms, and whether or not 
immortality was thereafter to be the portion for weal or 
woe of both, in any case it was the resurrection of men 
and women, not of shades. That belief was the outcome 
of nothing else than a strengthened and purified belief 
in God and a strengthened and purified morality or sense 
of the individual man’s or woman’s relation to God. And 
it is beyond doubt that the age in which the scribes and 
Pharisees and the lawyers of the Gospel arose was produc- 
tive of much real seeking after God and after the manner 
in which men may govern their lives aright. It gave 
birth not only to those now ill-reputed classes, but also 
to many plain people who ruled their lives less learnedly 
and methodically but probably on the average with sim- 
pler and purer hearts. 

The rabbinical literature of legal interpretation and 
of commentary upon the Scriptures which now exists 
was chiefly written in days after our Lord’s time and 
represents, adequately or not, that other form— con- 
trasting with Christianity—in which Judaism has 
survived; but it enshrines the memory of much eager 
discussion which had been going on long before our Lord’s 
time, preserving the good as well as the bad and the mid- 
dling, and —a real note of grace and of intellectual life — 
preserving often the argument which was overborne as 
well as that which prevailed. Even if it were fair to 
think of it as largely a mountain of rubbish, materials 
drawn from it would illuminate and expand what we can 





THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 163 


learn from the Gospels about Judaism in our Lord’s time. 
And the Gospels bring before us not only the existence of 
the plain people already mentioned, who depended much 
upon the scribes, yet for good or evil were apt to be very 
different from them, but also two quite different sides 
to authoritative Judaism and to its class in authority. 
Formalism, absurdity, casuistry of the poisonous sort, 
and hypocrisy were evidently there in plenty. The 
ruling system had hardened into something which our 
Lord would seem to have regarded as definitely evil and 
which He made it part of His mission to shatter. Its 
leading men were people whom as a class —and as a 
class that could hit back — He hit hard. But it is easy 
to see that a great deal of His moral teaching was given 
not as a novelty but with a confident appeal to the pre- 
vailing conscience, and that His attitude to individual 
lawyers was not necessarily one of opposition. The 
scribe in St. Mark who meets the saying about the two 
great commandments with a hearty and apt response is 
“not far from the kingdom of God.” St. Luke relates 
what was presumably the same incident, with a marked 
difference and with another context added. It does not 
matter here whether he is right in either respect ; what is 
significant is that he was told and accepted anything like 
this; and his story gives us the right answer when we ask 
where lay the strength and the weakness of the average law- 
yer of the bettersort. In St. Luke it is this lawyer, and not 
our Lord at all, who singles out from their contexts in 
Deuteronomy and Leviticus the two great command- 
ments. On the other hand, he immediately gives way 
to the desire “to justify himself,’’ and raises the mis- 
begotten question, “Who is my neighbor?’ When we 
look at Christianity as a code of simple moral precepts 
such as none but Jesus ever uttered, we are, in homely 


164 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


phrase, taking hold of the wrong end of the stick. For 
the moment, however, the point is this: If it is suggested 
that an ordinary Jew of the time, who for any reason 
accepted Jesus as the Christ, might himself have sup- 
plied from a commonly available stock a considerable 
part of the ethics of Christianity, the answer 1s to many 
people by no means obvious. 

But controversy at the present time is far more occu- 
pied with another side of the development of Jewish 
thought. In approaching this we do well to lay to heart 
one feature which Jewish religion retained steadfastly 
and transmitted in an altered form to primitive Chris- 
tianity. The relation of the individual soul to God 
might become the subject of more intense concern, but 
this in no way dulled the ardor of interest in the nation 
or community. The adjustment between a robust indi- 
vidualism and the claims of the State or of Society, which 
Greek philosophy ably thought out but which modern 
thought for a long while at least found hard, seems to 
effect itself easily, tacitly, and as if through instinct 
in the Old Testament, and in the New Testament cer- 
tainly no less. Further: in normal Christian thought, 
love of the Christian brotherhood did not tend to stifle 
the wider sense of human fellowship but on the contrary 
invigorated it much; and while nothing nearly so strong 
as this could be said of ancient Judaism, — indeed, far 
from it, — yet neither in the Old Testament nor in the 
thought of later centuries was a similar association of 
ideas quite shut out. “In thy seed shall all the nations 
of the earth be blessed.”’ And this forms no small part 
of the heritage which the thought of our days derives 

1 Mr. C. G. Montefiore’s Liberal Judaism and Dr. I. Abrahams’ Studies in Phari- 


saism and the Gospels (in two parts; Cambridge University Press) are books which I 
should like to call to the attention of some readers who may not know them; and I 
forbear my one adverse comment upon them. 





THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 165 


from the Jewish religion. The conception of the whole 
world as having a history behind it and a future before it 
runs through the Bible; and in Jewish thought the grow- 
ing sense of a world to come — or of an order of being not 
to be grasped by present human perceptions — never 
made what exists and happens on this earth seem either 
illusory or uninteresting. The course of this world, 
moreover, never seemed a mere tangle, or a mere decline 
or decay, or a drearily unending recurrence of the same 
successive phases, such as presented itself sometimes to 
Plato. For the Jew it postulated a great lapse at an early 
stage, but it was still the fulfillment of a great plan, a 
progress leading, through however many vicissitudes, to 
some sort of consummation. In this whole progress 
Israel had its part; and strangely exclusive and repel- 
lent to others as the Jews notoriously were, there is a 
sense in which the most parochial or the most atrociously 
jingo Jew aimed at ends which he could more or less 
regard as those of mankind and of the world. 

With this we may turn to certain expectations, closely 
related together, which were vividly if vaguely present to 
Jewish thought when Jesus Christ was born. The New 
Testament proves to us that Jews then very generally 
looked for — soon or late — some sort of redemption or 
deliverance of Israel; the coming of a Kingdom of God, 
which would be a reign of righteousness and might also 
be regarded as the restoration of a Kingdom of Israel ; 
a righting of the relations between the Jews and other 
peoples, especially their oppressors; behind these things 
the end of the world, and the coming, connected with all 
these transactions, of a great personage commonly called 
the Messiah. ‘Turning back to the Old Testament, we 
find abundant texts which Jews and Christians after- 
ward took as authority for these ideas, sometimes with 


166 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


more reason and sometimes with less. And we see 
throughout (playing of course a more prominent part 
than the thought of the world’s history and coming more 
closely home to the Jews) the conviction that God had 
made a promise to Israel; that the apparent breach of 
this promise, in the succession of afflictions through 
which Israel had passed and might pass, was in all cases 
chastisement made necessary by Israel’s sins; and that, 
undefeated by those sins, God would at last make good 
that promise in some tremendous consummation, upon 
which, though with increasing perplexity, longing eyes | 
were increasingly set. 

We are to notice how, during the interval between the 
periods of the Old and of the New Testament, the group 
of ideas in question became in a very natural way the sub- 
ject of more bewildered speculation, and yet in a very 
wonderful way the subject of more daring hope. All 
these ideas had of course that vagueness and fluidity 
which belong even to the most reasonable and useful 
anticipations of the far future, and belong too, in some 
measure, to the theories which underlie the existing con- 
stitution of any nation. 

We can best clear up some of the obscurities of this 
subject by beginning with the idea of the Messiah, which 
retains, beyond all the rest, an emotional interest for 
ourselves. It is evident that in our Lord’s days the 
expectation of him “that 1s to come,” if not always active, 
was always there to be aroused. It is also evident that 
“he that is to come’”’ was spoken of as the ‘‘Messiah”’ 
both in popular language and in the discussions of 
the learned and orthodox. “Messiah”? means the 
“anointed,’’ or in Greek, “christos’’; and in, this con-= 
nection it almost certainly suggested first an anointed 


king. David called Saul “the Lord’s anointed” and he 





THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 167 


became himself an anointed person referred to in many 
texts. Normally the expected Messiah was a prince of 
the house of David, but a famous question of our Lord’s 
to the scribes shows that the views about this were not 
fixed. As a matter of fact, the first of three historic 
persons who were hailed as the Messiah was a prince of 
the house of Levi, the least desirable of the Maccabees. 
The expectation of a “son of David”? would have been 
highly unacceptable under him. The last of the three 
was Bar Cochba, the leader of the final ill-fated uprising 
of the Jews in A.p. 132. 

But priests were anointed and prophets had _ been 
anointed, and the Messiah might be conceived of as 
priest or prophet or successor of the ancient judges of 
Israel rather than as king. His one constant character 
seems to have been that he was to appear on earth, 
presumably of human birth, as God’s vicegerent and the 
organ of His righteousness. In some forecasts of the 
* future in which he was named he might appear an otiose 
figure, the execution of God’s judgment being ascribed 
to God direct. But this may signify little, for the deeds 
actually believed to have been done by cherished figures 
in history are often spoken of in the Bible as done by the 
direct agency of God, and the tendency to speak thus 
must have been far stronger when the hero in question 
was not a figure of history or even legend, but a future 
person, of whom there was really little to be said. In- 
deed, the presence in such cases of this vague being shows 
the strength, not the weakness, of the inclination to link 
the great coming events with the coming of a person. 
_ Again, the conception of such a person, to come on earth 
as the last and supreme exponent of God’s justice, might 
be present without any use of the particular title, “Mes- 
siah.”? And there were no doubt forecasts of ultimate 


168 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


events in which neither the name nor any comparable 
figure was to be found at all; I shall have later to men- 
tion a visionary writing in which a prominent place is 
given to one who might be thought to express a radically 
altered conception of the Messiah, but who is perhaps 
more likely just a cloudy shape of literary dream. Though 
the dreams of different dreamers took different shapes 
and common men of different character might attribute 
different characters to the Messiah, it is a certain and 
remarkable fact that his coming was by no means unex- 
pected when Jesus of Nazareth came. 

Here we must look back to the ideas in the Old Tes- 
tament from which this Messianic thought was de- 
scended. The Old Testament abounds in passages 
which Christian divines from the Apostles downward 
have interpreted as prophetic of the Messiah and believed 
to have been fulfilled in our Lord. We are not concerned 
for the moment as to whether they really were fulfilled 
in our Lord, but we are concerned as to whether, gen- 
erally speaking, they had anything to do with the Messiah. 
It is now often said of many such passages that they had 
nothing to do with him, and this is argued in some cases 
with good reason — in others, as I think, absurdly. We 
clearly need not consider here such texts as “‘a bone of 
him shall not be broken,” in which, whatever else might 
be said about them, the Messianic idea could not be said 
to be expressed. These are merely examples of how the 
Jews loved to use symbolism and sometimes found sym- 
bolism in what had not been so intended. There are 
also instances of poetic figures once taken to be the 
Messiah, which are now generally thought to stand in 
some cases for God, or in other cases for the people of 
Israel. The correction in these instances is generally 
one which I should accept; though it is sometimes quite 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 160 


another question whether the poet himself (with all 
the associations which he really had in mind) would 
have thought the correction worth making. The mind 
of Hebrew poets seems sometimes to have passed 
easily from one to another of the ideas: a nation, the 
ancestor of that nation, its actual king, an expected 
king, an ideal, typical king or representative of the 
nation — in an unconscious way which we do not easily 
follow. 

It is quite unnecessary that we should examine all the 
supposed Messianic references; there is, however, a 
considerable class of texts, especially in the Psalms, which 
claim full attention, but on which certain broad consid- 
erations are obvious. As an example I take the words, 
“The Lord said unto my Lord, sit thou on my right 
hand until I make thine enemies thy footstool.”” Whom, 
in this instance, did the writer mean by “my Lord,”’ who 
was to sit at God’s right hand, and whose enemies were 
to be his footstool? The first part of the prediction 
might give us pause till we learn, as we easily may, that 
Jews and early Christians no more thought of God as a 
being who had literally a right hand than Longfellow did 
when he made some savage in Hiawatha “touch God’s 
right hand in the darkness.’’ Recognizing that this 
vehement phrase might merely be a very ample expression 
of the honor for which God had singled out the person 
addressed, most of us, I think, would now suppose that 
“my Lord” was, according to the date of the Psalm, 
either David or some reigning successor of his or some 
expected successor, of whom the poet demanded a prac- 
tical triumph over the heathen neighbors of his people. 
Assuming this as I do, and assuming the like, as I am 
prepared to do, in every like instance, I now ask myself 
a question which, frankly, I did not ask when, years ago, 


170 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


I first became aware that scholars interpreted Scripture 
in such ways: What is the change which this should 
make in my understanding of the Bible, if I had 
originally thought that the poet meant by “my Lord” 
Jesus Christ, pretty clearly preconceived: At some 
period I probably did think so. And the answer is in 
outline very plain. The Psalmist in question was not, 
I believe, expressing just that Messianic hope which was 
to grow up in after generations of his people, still less 
that precise form of Messianic hope which our grand- 
fathers imputed to him very literally, and which the 
Apostles too imputed to him, though —as scholarship 
suggests— not quite so literally. He was expressing a 
hope which reasonable and practical neighbors of his, 
if they had courage and backbone, might set their hearts 
upon and expect to see substantially fulfilled. He may 
have lived to see his immediate hope partly fulfilled for 
a time, or to see it woefully disappointed, or to see 
strange alternations of these two results; that depends on 
his precise date. But in any case the hope lived on among 
his people, with some startling momentary fulfillments 
that had their lasting consequences, and with disap- 
pointment thickening and deepening to a point at which, 
‘ when we read of it, we cannot but think that we should 
have quite despaired. And the hope lived on, changing, 
as the outlook darkened, into a form which was more 
glorious and was held with a more amazing tenacity. 
When the Apostles, sincerely believing in Jesus Christ, 
quoted the Psalmist as having spoken prophetically of 
Him, their historical error—if any— was much like 
that of the many Englishmen who have traced all their 
liberties to Magna Carta. In a sense which a child 


can understand, the hope of the Messiah, in the highest © 


form which it could ever take, was directly descended 


-, —— 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 171 


from the earliest Psalmist’s hope of a worthy successor 
to the throne of David. 

If we tried to trace the development of the idea of the 
Messiah down to our Lord’s time, we should be likely 
to find not only interruption but retrogression. As has 
been said, it occurs only in connection with the more 
general idea of a revival of Israel and an ultimate fulfill- 
ment of God’s purposes, and, if hope of these things was 
to remain at all, current thought about them was bound 
to become in some ways less shallow and more capable of 
rising to an elevated conception of the Messiah when 
that was presented to it. Nevertheless, so far as the fig- 
ure of the Messiah is concerned, the deepest visions which 
ever came to individuals in days before our Lord are to be 
found in prophets from (say) a century and a half before 
the Captivity in Babylon to a short time after it ended. 
And the Apostles, we know, looked to these prophets 
for light upon our Lord’s being, and not, so far as we 
know, to speculations of a date nearer their own time. 
Thus it will be worth while here to take full stock of the 
character of the prophecies to which they looked back. 

In the case of one of the earlier of these prophets we 
know enough of the chief events that happened in his time 
to be able to read his vision of things far distant in con- 
nection with his views of practical politics. The first 
thirty-nine chapters of the book of Isaiah can safely be 
ascribed, with the omission of several quite distinct in- 
sertions, to the actual Isaiah, the son of Amos, whose 
active life covered the time when the kingdom of Israel 
perished and ended, about 700 B.c., while the sorely 
threatened kingdom of Judah had still more than a 
century to survive.! His earliest visions came toward 


1The chief passage to be omitted, and to be referred to some much later date is 
Isaiah xxiv to xxvi. Also Chapters xxxvili and xxxix seem to belong before Chapters 


172 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


the close of a prosperous time in the history of Judah, 
and were messages of religious, moral, and social reform, 
backed by an awful sense that this prosperous people, 
supposed to be God’s people, were piling up God’s ven- 
geance against themselves. The religious evil of the time 
was not that people forsook their God for the gods of the 
heathen, but that they did not truly regard Him asa right- 
eous God. A tremendous peril was approaching, from 
which God only could save them; and He would not 
save them, because they did not serve Him. Popular 
solemnities and ceremonies were not His true service; 
they only blinded the conscience of all classes to the 
fact that the land reeked with luxury, avarice, op- 
pression, and graft. Soon it appears that the peril 
which Isaiah foresees — years before the enslavement 
of Northern Israel and more than a century before 
the taking of Jerusalem—is the imperial power of 
Assyria. Others, thinking of the same danger, place 
great hope upon confederation with neighboring powers 
or combinations of powers, greater or less: Egypt, Moab, 
Northern Israel, Syria. Next Syria and Northern Israel 
invade Judah, to force it to enter their combination, and 
the Jews are in great fear. Isaiah had derided their 
hopes of help through Egyptian protection or help from 
a confederacy — those would not stand against Assyria. 
He now derided their fears— Jerusalem would stand 
against Rezin and Pekah. And he was right. Years 
xxxvi and xxxvii, for Merodach-Baladan’s attempt to erect a kingdom of Babylon 
came long before the unsuccessful expedition which Sennacherib sent against Jerusa- 
lem. A good explanation can apparently be found as to why an editor three hundred 
years later thus misarranged the text. The book when reconstructed in this, which 
seems a safe way, has a much more impressive close. Verse 38 of Chapter xxxvii may 
also be the editor’s insertion, for Sennacherib died some time after this disaster, when 
Isaiah, if alive, would have been about ninety. As to this book of the original Isaiah, 
or indeed about the prophets generally, I do not know that anything better can be 


read than Matthew Arnold’s “Isaiah of Jerusalem,” written when the Revised Version 
of the Old Testament was in prospect. 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 1B 


later, the army of Sennacherib came up against Jerusa- 
lem, and Isaiah, who was at least seventy and had for 
years proclaimed the vast strength of Assyria, now stif- 
fened the back of Hezekiah to resist. However the event 
came about, that event, as we all know, justified him. 
Perhaps we may say at once that the great poet saw the 
trend of events with the clear, unillusioned, dauntless eye 
of a great statesman. But if we think the old man’s 
contempt for the threats of Rabshakeh (“The virgin, 
the daughter of Zion, hath despised thee and laughed 
thee to scorn’’) strange after all that he had once said 
about the irresistible might of Assyria, the answer lies on 
the surface of his story. He would have nothing to do 
with coalitions which would really have hastened the 
Assyrian conquest and which in the meantime would 
have compromised the independence of Judah. That 
independence was a thing to be defended at all hazards, 
because, beyond all other reasons, this petty state, how- 
ever corrupted, was still the nucleus of the kingdom 
of God. 

And here we pass from his vision of things within the 
scope of reasoned foresight to his vision of what in fact 
lay very far away: “‘Nevertheless, the dimness shall not 
be such —” “There shall come forth a rod out of the 
stem of Jesse.’’ When believers in Jesus Christ have 
said that the prophet’s dream was true, have they been 
reading him right? Hopes and fears must have been 
differently blended in him at different times, and so com- 
plete consistency is perhaps not to be sought in his 
prophecies. As a poet, he might claim that he had 

something to say which was independent of the literal 
accuracy of his statements. Also some doubtful ques- 
tions of scholarship may arise here. But we may assume 
that, at one time at least, he did definitely, as Matthew 


174 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Arnold says, “put his Immanuel too soon by seven cen- 
turies.”’ Another of the greatest prophets, Micah, had a 
similarly premature hope about the same time. Perhaps 
we may assume that a literal despoiling of the Philistines 
and of Edom, Moab, and Ammon by a restored and 
reunited Israel, under a prince of the throne of David, 
entered into his visions. But, recognizing fully his kin- 
ship with earlier seers whose thoughts were not at all 
concerned with any Prince of Peace, we must equally 
recognize other features of his prophecy which are quite 
as strongly marked. These show alike Isaiah’s hold on 
realities and the far range of his sane poetical inspiration. 

To begin with, Isaiah is entirely in earnest with his 
preaching that God is a God of righteousness in the 
largest sense; that the only service of Him is by right- 
eousness; that His favor for His chosen people is condi- 
tional on their learning to do right. Now that we have 
happily lost any notion that all manner of. heathen are 
in all ways wicked, we may be apt to forget that this is 
a remarkable thing; but to think godliness and goodness 
the same was an idea that did not come naturally to those 
estimable men, our own and other people’s rude fore- 
fathers. To the men who first thought it clearly and 
said it loud the heartfelt conversion to it of a country, 
king and all, cannot have seemed quite impossible. And 
if they judged further that a people who were in some 
real degree so converted would become possessed of an 
astonishing power, common sense and the partial examples 

1J—n choosing this phrase I am not assuming that there is no distinction between 
the sense in which the prophets (who were also of course poets) were inspired and the 
sense in which, as Mr. A. C. Bradley would tell us, some at least of our poets have been 
inspired. For all that I know there may be a very substantial distinction. But there 
are points of identity. And one of these is that both these characters are generally 
akin not to the lunatic but to the exceptionally level-headed man. The few facts 


known about him are enough to prove that Isaiah, like Wordsworth, was a man with 
an unusually steady head in times of peril. 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 175 


and analogies which history gives us show that this 
was reasonable on their part. Isaiah’s prevailing tone, 
in this respect, was certainly not what we should call 
sanguine; the true comment upon him would rather be 


that he 


did not shrink from hope 
in the worst moment of those evil days; 
From hope, the paramount duty that Heaven lays 
For its own honor on man’s suffering heart.! 


He knew that the people of Judah would revolt more 
and more, and accordingly foreboded calamity upon 
calamity for them. But a “remnant’’ would escape 
from the ruin, a very small remnant. It would be like 
the stump of a tree cut down and burned. Only the sap 
of life would still be in that stump, yet after all there 
would come a startling growth from it — as did happen. 

Here it is worth noting that his unpopular warnings 
of the full strength of Assyria were free from the least 
tendency, such as writers on such a theme have often 
shown, to idealize the Assyrian. He might have said : — 


Never may from our souls one truth depart, 
That an accursed thing it is to gaze 
On prosperous tyrants with a dazzled eye. 


The great power, which he does not minimize, is a brutal 
power, and God may use it as the instrument of His anger, 
but will break it in good time. Yet for the surrounding 
nations, and not only for that chosen to be the first depos- 
itory of his truth, God has a purpose beyond vengeance, 
a merciful purpose, of which the chosen nation is to be 
the instrument for them. At one moment Isaiah’s vision 
of what is to come upon the restoration of Judah may 


1 The italics are Wordsworth’s own. 


176 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


seem to be limited to the restoration of a remnant of 
Northern Israel as well, to peace and reunion of the two, 
and to their jointly prevailing over their enemies. But 
elsewhere he has a larger vision, and one which cannot 
be regarded as at all a wild dream of what might be about 
to happen fairly soon. A purified Judah (Northern Is- 
rael is not here mentioned) is to remain as a small inde- 
pendent state between Egypt and the Assyrian empire, 
and it is to be the centre from which the knowledge of 
God will spread to and will regenerate both. More gen- 
erally his vision is wider still, and while less definite has 
in some sense and in some part been actually fulfilled. 
Zion is the possessor of a light which will one day so burn 
that all the Gentile nations will come to it. It is with 
this largest hope, one which definitely embraces all 
mankind, that Isaiah links his expectation of the true 
heir of David, the son of Jesse. If he is conceived at all 
as a victorious soldier who, as it were, “with the breath 
of his mouth shall slay the wicked,” he is still more the 
righteous judge, the upholder of the humble, the source 
of saving knowledge. He shall “reprove with equity 
for the meek of the earth ... and the earth shall be 
full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover 
the’ sea’: 2). . Wand*his\ name ‘shall*be called #i.- eam ie 
Hrinceonbeactcny 

All this is prose analysis of what is set down very 
plainly in Isaiah; and there is no such adequate comment 
upon his vision as the music of Handel’s mighty chorus. 
When men long after— Handel, for example — saw the 
vision fulfilled in Jesus Christ (this is not the point at 
which to ask whether they misjudged Jesus Christ), 
they certainly did not misinterpret Isaiah. 

It is not at all necessary here to notice all the prophecies 
which can properly be understood as Messianic; but | 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND iy fre 


I shall refer here to one later prophet, because his in- 
fluence on the Apostles appears in the Acts to have been 
marked, and it is often said that they mistook his meaning. 
The follower of Isaiah whose writings were afterward 
incorporated with his appears to have prophesied shortly 
before the return from the Captivity, say about 540 B.c. 
He had nothing expressly to say of the house of David 
or stem of Jesse. The Lord’s anointed was for him 
Cyrus, and he does not seem to have expected a resto- 
ration of David’s line in the person of Zerubbabel; rather 
perhaps he may have expected what did come to pass, 
an attempt to revert to the earlier (perhaps legendary) 
theocracy, only with a priestly caste in place of its 
judges and prophets. It accords too with the situation 
of the remnant that was to return that there was no 
thought here of victorious wars on their part. But the 
distinctive hopes of the original Isaiah have by no means 
disappeared. A reign of God’s righteousness, spreading 
its sway over the Gentiles, prevailing over much iniquity 
in Jerusalem too, yet centring in Jerusalem, is the great 
theme of this book; according to the interpretation 
which the Apostles and many people before and after 
them have put upon certain chapters of it, the exalted 
being who was to have been God’s organ in the older 
prophecy reappears. He no longer has his hereditary 
rank and his instant claim upon the Jewish allegiance, 
but his greater attributes have been developed. He is 
not only to “reprove with equity for the meek of the 
earth’’; he is to come as emphatically one of them, the 
very pattern (as we may say) of the meekness that has a 
_ worthy cause, and it is after and through meekness and 
suffering that he will be exalted high. I am of course 
aware that the marvelous image of “my righteous serv- 
ant”’ is often said to stand for no individual but for 


178 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


the people of Israel corporately. So the servant does in 
some places, for example in Chapter xliv, where he is 
“Jacob, my servant,’ and in passages where he is not at 
all righteous; and a Western reader might expect him to 
do so throughout. But, when, in Chapter xlix, it is the 
servant’s function to bring Jacob again to God, or “to 
raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to restore the preserved 
of Israel,” clearly he does so no more. Has he again 
become the whole people in Chapter liii? Upon that 
supposition no good sense can be made of what the 
prophet says. It would surely be ridiculous, for example, 
to interpret him as saying that the Jewish people cor- 
porately had “poured out their soul unto death” with a 
set purpose of expiating the sins of the Gentiles; and it 
would not be less ridiculous if, like some commentators, 
we made the prophet put these remarks into the mouths 
of Gentile kings. And there I might leave this mar- 
velous and most individual image,' but the triumphant 


1 Tf we understand the prophet (a Jew) to be speaking to the Jews in his own person, 
and at the same time take the “servant”’ to be the Jews corporately, the whole chapter 
reads into nonsense, thus: “‘ You Jews will one day see yourselves as a people, when it 
will strike you that you are an ugly race. You will then go on to remark that, not 
having deserved any punishment, you have been severely punished, and by this vica- 
rious suffering on your own behalf, have escaped being punished at all, while all the 
time richly deserving punishment.” 

This nonsense is quite avoided if the “servant” is taken to be an individual great 
leader of the Jews; but that idea was “to the Jews a stumbling-block.” The oldest 
known rabbinical commentary before Christ recognizes clearly that the natural inter- 
pretation is to take the afflicted “servant” as an individual raised up by God, but 
casts about for some explanation which will avoid this shocking idea. Later rabbis, 
apparently in Christian times, found a way out by putting the whole of Chapter liii 
into the mouths of a chorus of Gentile kings — mentioned at the end of lii — and inter- 
preting the “servant” as meaning the Jews as a nation. The idea of the Jews as an 
innocent people, vicariously and of their own free will suffering for the sins of all the 
Gentile nations, commended itself to them and does so to some modern commentators. 
But besides being in itself ridiculous, it is quite contrary to what all previous prophets 
— and in particular the actual Isaiah — had said of the Jews; and it is not, I think, 
lessened by putting it into the mouths of the Gentile kings. 

If the prophet means by the “servant” an individual, it makes no difference whetiier 
he puts Chapter liii into the mouths of these kings or speaks in his own person. His 
meaning is an advance upon what Isaiah had said, but along the same line. In any 
case, the Apostles understood him in the same sense in which I do. 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 179 


chapters with which the prophet closes demand a few 
words. Whether he “that cometh from Edom with dyed 
garments from Bozrah”’ be this same servant who had 
been wounded and bruised, or whether, as is likely 
enough, it is God Himself whose own arm is here seen 
prevailing, or whether, as also seems to me quite likely, 
the poet is not to be pinned to either of these as a neces- 
sary interpretation, I will not discuss. But here the mil- 
itant spirit of the old Isaiah may seem to be revived in 
full force, and indeed with a zest for carnage which is 
unlike that stern seer who had dealt manfully with actual 
war, and accordingly wished every warrior’s panoply 
and trophies to be burned. Really this later vision is no 
more concerned with any literal encounter of armed 
forces than is Heber’s great hymn, “The Son of God goes 
forth to war’; and the prophet contemplates God’s 
ultimate triumph over all forces of opposing ill in far 
greater detachment from any great political drama, 
beginning to be acted under his eyes, than was possible 
to his predecessor. He is looking forward solely to a 
catastrophe more cosmic, more ultimate, and more 
wrapped in mystery than the downfall (or possible con- 
version) of Assyria. In this respect those who shortly 
before our Lord sought to interpret or amplify prophecy 
were in some degree like him. But they were far gone 
not only in mystery but in depression and gloom. Gloom 
is not absent from this prophet’s pages; they reiterate 
the threat of vengeance on those who to the end are hard- 
ened against God’s righteousness; and indeed the book 
closes with words which, especially as quoted in the New 
Testament, have perhaps made more people shudder 
than any other words of any book. Yet what the 
prophet has carried forward from the war poetry of the 
old Israel is not so much any lust of retribution to enemies 


180 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


as the full-grown vitality of manhood, exultant and ex- 
uberant, subtly woven into the fabric of his tale of a man 
of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And this too is 
part of the legacy which young Christianity accepted 
from him. 

What remains to be said of the recurrent image of the 
Messiah can be said more briefly. As has been said, it 
was obviously one that might or might not arise in the 
forecasts of the future, on which men of different opin- 
ions and different temper ventured under different cir- 
cumstances, but to which Jewish thought was most 
exceptionally prone. But the hierarchy which in the last- 
mentioned prophet’s time came to possess all that could 
be restored of David’s sovereignty elaborated and cod- 
ified its partly ancient laws. And when it did so it 
incorporated with them or added to them collections 
and recensions of the national legend and history, the 
most sacred of its poetry, and the prophetic writings 
from the first down to the latest which it recognized as 
inspired. Thereby it enshrined the tradition of the 
earliest heroes and of the promise to them, and in par- 
ticular the tradition and the hope of David, in the central 
chambers of its whole edifice. The regular religious 
teachers of the people thereafter necessarily conned and 
pondered and expounded many a text to which they were 
forced to give a Messianic significance, since they were 
bound not to treat them as either mere antiquity or 
mere fairy story. A time came when the actual priestly 
government had long ceased to play any very glorious 
part in patriotic eyes, and when too it belonged to a sect 
whose piety at its best had been opposed to the loftier 
and to the more popular trend of religious thought. This 
in itself, we must suppose, would give a fresh attractive- 
ness to hopes, whatever fantastic and conflicting forms 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 181 


they might take, of David’s rightful heir. And though 
the requirement of heirship to that king could be inter- 
preted elastically or, if necessary, explained away, there 
was always in human nature the not ill-founded expec- 
tation that a great event will be the work of a great man. 
If the promised kingdom meant a successful armed na- 
tional uprising, clearly it must imply a great captain. 
If it meant rather, what was in many quiet minds pri- 
mary, the reconciliation of the people’s hearts to their 
righteous God, then a Moses or an Elijah or one like them 
but greater might well seem needed. There must, I 
venture to think, have been two strains of thought 
which would constantly lead men to cherish the promise 
of the Messiah, though in very different ways. The 
fierce insurgent feelings of a patriotism which never 
slept would turn to that promise and read it in its own 
way. Ihe deeper piety which we know was there, 
undemonstratively seeking after God, must no _ less 
certainly have dwelt often upon such a vision as that of 
God’s righteous servant. The insurgent view of the 
Messiah was that which would appeal to popular sen- 
timent with immediate dynamic force. The contrasting 
view was one to which the serious thought of countless 
plain people would in sober moments yield a deep re- 
sponse. In this simple consideration we shall later see 
the key to some of the most remarkable features in the 
Gospel narrative. 

As has been said, the essential character of the Messiah 
was that of a vicegerent of God, representing Him on 
_ earth in what was to be at once His kingdom and in some 
sense that of His chosen people. And while the Mes- 
sianic conception is a subject which has raised these 
somewhat complex considerations, the wider conceptions 
in which it was an element underwent a development of 


182 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


which the broad features are plain enough. Enough evi- 
dence on this matter is given by a body of literature, 
more or less popular at the Christian era, to which schol- 
ars have paid great attention of late. It consists for the 
most part of writings which purported to be the work of — 
great men long gone by, from Ezra back to Enoch. They 
bore fictitious names because this was the readiest way 
in which the speculations of their authors on great sub- 
jects could engage attention, in an age when prophetic 
inspiration could not be claimed for them. Those of 
them which mainly concern us were “apocalypses”’ ; 
that is, they purported to be revelations of a coming 
climax to the history of the Jews, the world, and the 
universe ; there were also psalms belonging to the same 
period and expressing the like idea. ‘Those which sur- 
vive are attributed to dates ranging from shortly before 
the Maccabees, say before 170 B.c., to 100 or more A.D. ; 
and besides the great Apocalypse or Revelation of St. 
John there were doubtless Christian apocalypses and also 
half-Christian apocalypses. One of them is the book 
commonly called II Esdras, which is included in our 
Apocrypha, that well-known collection of books deemed 
venerable but not authoritative in Jerusalem, but ranked 
with the Old Testament by Jews in Alexandria. Of 
these apocalypses II Esdras has been said to be the most 
touching and beautiful. I need not here attempt to es- 
timate the quality of these apocalypses or the degree of 
vogue or influence which they are likely to have obtained. 
They plainly offered a vent to the ideas of people outside 
the circle of recognized and orthodox teachers; they 
were an attractive vehicle for bold speculations of a 
kind, would supply some natural demands of popular 
taste, and are said to have enjoyed special favor in Gal- 
ilee. In any case the light which they throw upon some 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 183 


aspects of living religious thought in our Lord’s day 
is plain. 

It had long been growing dismally clear that no such 
deliverance as had been wrought by Gideon against the 
Midianites or David against the Philistines was going 
to be lastingly achieved against the succession of mighty 
empires which Judah had since known as neighbors and 
frequent oppressors. Yet God’s promise endured, and 
men whose knowledge of the world would have kept 
them from following some new professed champion of 
their country’s cause reasoned that the deliverance 
would one day be wrought by God’s arm alone in some 
manner past ordinary comprehension. Following up 
this thought, they might please themselves with any kind 
of fancy as to the havoc which would be made of their 
enemies by Him who wielded the lightning and the earth- 
quake; or they might be led along the tracks of thought 
through which men conceive of a future world quite 
different from this, or of an underlying reality which 
sense dimly, if at all, reveals. And these different orders 
of ideas might be blended. At the same time another 
process of thought, not arising from any despair of this 
world, had spread and strengthened the belief in immor- 
tality. Thus men who dwelt much on supernatural 
future happenings told of a reign of God forever on earth, 
or of the end of earth and heaven and the making of all 
things new, or of the earthly reign as temporary and 
leading to the greater consummation. . In any event a 
reward was coming to the righteous, but that reward 
might be thought of grossly and absurdly or in a spirit- 
ually minded fashion. The requital of the unrighteous 
was a further and to some minds alluring subject of spec- 
ulation. And then, who were the righteous, for whom 
bliss was in store somewhere? And who were the un- 


184 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


righteous, over whom dreadful judgments impended! 
The former were never thought to include all Jews, and 
the latter could seldom or never be thought to include 
all Gentiles; yet it remained unquestionable that the 
Jews were God’s chosen people and might in a general 
way be considered His faithful people, while in a general 
way all heathen were His enemies. Here then was a 
problem with which many would be sorely puzzled, 
while some were content to hope for a general subjugation 
of the Gentiles, and some few (or not so few) hoped for 
their ultimate conversion. 

I have already spoken of various aspects in which the 
Messiah might be introduced in these connections. It 
should be added that the copious lore about angels and 
fallen angels which seems to have had its origin during 
the Babylonian captivity was worked out by writers of 
apocalypses as well as by the rabbinical expositors of 
Scripture. Nor does this list exhaust the number of points 
on which simple or speculative minds might ask ques- 
tions, but on which the Scriptures gave them uncertain 
answers or none at all. JI am not suggesting that there 
had come to exist among the Jews any thought-out and 
systematic solution of any of the problems here spoken 
of. Probably strong minds were able to face the fact 
that these issues were mysterious. But apocalyptic 
literature proves, if proof be needed, that curiosity upon 
such matters was rife; and it presents us with a rich 
variety of attempts made with mote or less seriousness 
to satisfy that curiosity. It may be taken as certain 
that our Lord and the Apostles were familiar with the 
general trend of such speculations. Some scholars have 
suggested that the doctrines of Christianity were in- 
fluenced by ideas taken from apocalyptic literature in an 
important respect which we shall have to consider later. 


THE JEWISH BACKGROUND 185 


In taking account of the influence of such speculations 
we must of course observe how nearly related most of 
their topics were to the very springs of Jewish patriotism. 
Nevertheless we should remember that this can never 
have been the workaday side of religion. In this respect 
what St. Paul would have called the spiritual mind and 
the commonest wisdom of the world were at one; then, 
as now, both demanded direction in the ordinary con- 
duct of life; and both sought it then in the precepts of 
the Old Testament, though they might use them very 
differently. Brought up on the Law and the Prophets, 
some found self-contentment in the minute observance 
of petty rules; some hungered and thirsted after a 
righteousness on the whole more largely conceived than 
it can then have been elsewhere in the world. These 
were the religious influences of primary importance; 
but roving imaginations about the future played their 
part. There was much in them which sincerely pious 
if not powerful minds would prize highly. Speculations 
which in themselves are worth little may often excite 
deeper thoughts in those who are touched by them. 

The New Testament story begins with men who lived 
in a world of thought, some of whose features I have 
tried to mark in this chapter. Before its close their 
world of thought had been transformed into one which 
we should all hesitate to analyze, but with which we are 
all in a way familiar, and which has lost for us its special 
associations with Judea. Criticism of the New Tes- 
tament is the study of that transformation. 

Was what happened a sudden regrouping of elements 
_ long present together, such as an ordinary sincere moral- 
ist or even an ordinary fanatic might have caused un- 
wittingly if he intervened when, so to speak, the tem- 
perature and atmospheric conditions happened to be 


186 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


favorable? Or did it come to pass under the conscious 
hand of one in whom we recognize great genius, and in 
whom, having once clearly recognized that, we may 
perhaps be forced to see much more? 





XII 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT OF THE FIRST ~ 
CHRISTIANS 


I sHALL now recall some well-known features of that 
larger world amid which the Jewish community kept it- 
self to a remarkable degree isolated, and give more fully 
some account of religions then prevailing in that world, 
of which readers who are not special students may be 
expected to know very little. 

The part of the world which we must consider lay 
wholly within the Roman Empire and chiefly within that 
Eastern part of the Empire in which the Greek language 
prevailed, for it does not concern us here that Christianity 
spread beyond the Eastern boundaries of the Empire to 
an extent of which we know little. We are to think of a 
time before any distinctively Western influence upon 
Christian thought can have been appreciable. Utterly 
foreign to us as were some of the religious movements 
which we shall have to notice, the world in which they 
and Christianity after them were spreading was in some 
respects already that civilized world in which we now 
live. 

Just when the dominions of Rome were reaching what, 
with trifling exceptions, may be called their final limits, 
there arose in Rome itself a form of government which 
was at least capable of bearing imperial responsibilities. 


188 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


The establishment of the Empire was a happy thing, felt 
to be so—one might say —almost everywhere except 
in Jerusalem and in Rome. It meant enduring peace, 
good order, secure communications (with all the help that 
they gave to commerce), and a system of administration 
which was in some places conspicuously just, and which 
tended to become so everywhere. ‘These furnished out- 
ward conditions which might favor any kind of human 
progress; and moreover, the fact of an Empire capable 
of such results was in itself what we must call a spiritual 
influence. Vergil has left usin the Zineid the great memo- 
rial of how that Empire might be regarded by some of 
those who assisted at its rise, familiar though we are with 
the ugly sides of the story. It may surprise us more that 
provincials, especially in the East, were disposed to look 
at it in the same light as Vergil. There are signs, of 
course, that St. Paul and St. Luke did so. One great 
mark of the prevailing view of the Empire was the readi- 
ness of many Easterners to pay to the reigning Emperor 
divine honors — hard as it is for us to grasp exactly what 
those honors meant. The Empire brought with it a live- 
lier conception than had ever before prevailed of one in- 
habited world, of one human race inhabiting it, and of 
a general welfare of that race. It put fresh life into that 
Hellenistic civilization which had been spread over the 
regions in which we are here especially interested, about 
three hundred years before. 

It had been the conscious ambition of that — in many 
respects — very undesirable savage, Alexander, and of his 
successors, to spread over the East all that they them- 
selves appreciated in the civilization of those Greek city- 
states whose independent and internecine vitality they 
themselves were so powerfully helping to extinguish. 
These potentates were great founders or restorers of cities, 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 189 


which they adorned not merely with their own palaces 
but with all the places of public resort, baths, theatres, 
gymnasia, and the like, which were to be found (say) in 
Athens. Greek municipal institutions, clubs, and social 
organizations were founded. Greek art, Greek athletics, 
Greek drama, Greek schools, Greek lecturers, philosophers, 
rhetoricians, and artists found new homes. The Greek 
language became the language of government, commerce, 
learning, and fashion over a large space of the earth, and 
therewith came, of course, widespread acquaintance with 
a great literature. The immense force of this movement 
was doubtless due to the fact that large numbers of the 
most vigorous and enterprising Greeks themselves mi- 
grated in the wake of the Macedonian conquerors, or had 
served in their armies and settled in the new or revived 
centres of population and trade. Of course, among the 
multitudes who in St. Paul’s time spoke Greek the portion 
of Greek blood present was very small, and that of Greek 
genius smaller. ‘The life of that age which is now spoken 
of as Hellenistic is not inspiring to us to think of — far 
less attractive, not merely than that of the old Greeks 
but than that of many a relatively barbarous people. 
Yet it was marked off from what we call barbarism, and 
no doubt relatively at least from the life of Judaism, by 
a large measure of those gifts which the Renaissance long 
after derived from Greek influences and brought to modern 
Europe. Even its decadent theatre gave a wider range 
to human sympathy. Its art and its far too professional 
athletics caused a keener interest in the possibilities of 
human performance. In short, “humanism,” meaning 
an enlarged sense of the capacities of human nature for 
enjoyment and for achievement, was widely spread. And 
so certainly was rationalism, or the sense that things have 
their reasons which it is a good thing to explore and to 


190 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


discuss. ‘This, as will be pointed out in a moment, did not 
go very deep; but it was there to be some day used. The 
amazing success that could be achieved by emigrant or 
wandering orators and philosophers proves that keen and 
varied intellectual interests of some sort were widely 
diffused. ) 

We learn that early Christian converts seldom belonged 
to the upper circles of Hellenistic life, but such influ- 
ences as theirs spread wide. Exceptional intellectual 
activity is more freely and surprisingly scattered about 
than upper circles have commonly been aware. The 
congregations to whom St. Paul thought it worth while 
to write his Epistles were not people of stunted intelli- 
gence. 

The great days of Greek philosophy were long over. 
What it had come to mean during three generations of 
extraordinary men at Athens was the sustained and me- 
thodical attempt of a number of picked men, the flower 
of a highly trained race, working in codperation, to or- 
ganize all available knowledge, to extend its bounds dar- 
ingly in every hopeful direction, and to apply it to the 
service of well-ordered States and to the strengthening 
and purifying of the individual souls most capable of it. 
Such a design could be entertained only during the short 
period when a peculiarly intense civic and social life was 
at its highest in an unusually gifted race. In the re- 
stricted sense now often given to the word, that of the 
patient attempt to clear up the fundamental ideas of all 
human thought and knowledge, “philososphy”’ died out 
with Aristotle, Plato’s only important successor; and in 
this respect their work was to remain scarcely understood 
for over two thousand years. Even that passionate 
interest in truth as such which had distinguished these 
men ceased to be what, according to Plato, Socrates had 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 191 


declared it should be, the prominent characteristic of all 
who aspired to be philosophers. 

~The greatest movement to which the name of philos- 
ophy was attached in the last three centuries B.c. was 
Stoicism. The Stoic School was started in actual revolt 
against the tendency of philosophy to idle speculation, 
and its whole effort was concentrated on the regulation of 
life in accordance with reason. With this earnest — and 
sometimes slightly narrow — absorption in the practical 
application of a rule of life, the Stoics took the rule itself 
somewhat uncritically, and picked up a philosophic or 
religious doctrine which seemed sufficient to support it 
without any such vigorous and independent effort di- 
rected to first principles as would make that side of this 
great movement demand special remark now. None the 
less it directed, during centuries, many strong minds and 
wills to practical problems of righteousness, and ma- 
terialistic as its doctrine of the universe may be called, 
could evoke a high strain of piety in such simple souls as 
the boxer Cleanthes, whose great hymn is possibly alluded 
to in St. Paul’s reference to “certain of your own poets.” 
The scarcely less famous Cynics were not so much a 
school as a host of vehement odd persons who made war 
on the mere conventions, on the luxuries, and occasionally 
on the decencies of ordinary life. Cynicism might take a 
disreputable form, idle and conceitedly eccentric under its 
ruggedness, or it might produce preachers ready to testify 
at all risks on behalf of some right and enlightened cause. 
In contrast with the Stoics, with their principle of duty, 
stood the Epicureans, whose professed principle was pleas- 
ure. Paradoxically but naturally, too, the sterner school 
made the more popular appeal. Epicureans, however, 
were not necessarily — the frugal and gentle Epicurus 
least of all — the fat hogs that poets have called them. 


192 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


They were apt to be refined people with refined pleasures, 
and those of them who took up with enthusiasm a philo- 
sophic theory of a materialistic sort, in which the gods 
had an otiose place if any, were moved to this by the 
cruelty and degradation which they saw in superstition. 

The other schools which in those centuries had any 
continuous life were attractive only to a select few of 
the intellectual people. Neither the skeptical Academics, 
who in some loose way were affiliated to the school of 
Plato, nor the men who were equally vaguely associated 
with that of Aristotle, signify for our purpose, except as 
showing the prevalence of keen intellectual interests, 
without as a rule the output of any remarkable intellectual 
force. The greatest exception is that among certain 
schools — notably, so long as they lasted, among the 
Pythagoreans, who moreover had been from the first a 
sort of religious order with a high rule of life — science 
still progressed in the spheres of mathematics and of 
astronomy or elementary cosmography. It is a note- 
worthy fact that the Copernican system of astronomy 
came near to being established by the Pythagoreans of 
the Hellenistic age, if indeed Plato and his Pythagorean 
friends were not on the point of anticipating them. 
Biological science, which had been pursued in the school 
of Plato and with special vigor by Aristotle, did not 
entirely die out, especially since medicine continued 
naturally to be practised with earnestness. But many 
mathematicians, from the first, had had a strange habit 
of treating the facts with which they dealt as somehow sig- 
nificant of moral or cosmological principles with which 
they had nothing to do. And medicine, with its attend- 
ant botany and zodlogy, readily took up with myth and 
idle folklore or with dogmas which it supposed to be 
derived from philosophy or religion. 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 193 


The Hellenistic age was thus one in which both moral 
earnestness and intellectual activity were far from un- 
common. Discussion was apt to be keen, and new ideas 
met both with eager sympathy and with eager criticism. 
- But the hopes which philosophy had once conceived might 
have seemed then forever frustrated, and the reason of 
civilized man, stirring as it was, easily came under the 
spell of superstition or of ancient but ill-founded authority, 
scholastic or sacerdotal. 

The great philosophers had never conceived the idea of 
any fundamental reform of the religion of their peoples 
generally, even if we suppose them all to have arrived in 
their own minds at any clear reconciliation between their 
own principles and the worship of their fathers. The 
exclusion from the city of all definitely vile elements in 
current mythology was the utmost extent to which they 
thought it possible to go, even in an ideal city; and in 
their own actual cities they could do little even toward 
this. Nothing to which reverence attached was lightly 
to be disturbed, and loyalty to the community involved 
loyalty to its ancestral gods. ‘To questions which oc- 
curred to common people as to the relation of their own 
gods to other people’s other gods, or as to whether gods 
existed at all, philosophy in the days of its strength could 
give no answer. Meanwhile it was helping to promote 
the habit of questioning, and was bringing into currency 
ideas about the world which would enter into the rising 
ferment of general religious opinion. 

Long before the Christian era, gods conceived of as 
specially belonging to a particular city had begun to seem 
of small account, and probably the system of gods and 
goddesses associated with Olympus, with which classical 
education makes us acquainted, never had any very 
strong hold on belief. One city or nation became ready 


194 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


to accept a god from another nation, as being its own 
under another name or in some way easy to fit into its 
fluid polytheistic scheme. Impressive or exciting rites 
brought from afar spread rapidly with the special deities 
that they involved. Monotheistic belief accommodated - 
itself easily to polytheistic worship. ‘The ancient civili- 
zations and priesthoods of Egypt and Babylon and Persia 
— from the two first of which early Greek philosophers 
had merely borrowed certain long-ago discovered facts 
used in surveying or in astrology — gained a fresh repu- 
tation for wisdom; and their ideas of theology and of the 
physical universe traveled far, carrying with them also 
the elements of astrology and magic and a plentiful lore 
of demonology. Pious philosophic minds labored to con- 
struct for themselves harmonies of the religions round 
them, and leavened them with conceptions drawn from 
philosophy — as, for example, in regard to the relations 
of mind and matter, body and soul, reason and sense 
perception. Meanwhile interest in a life after death 
steadily grew. In short, the Hellenistic age teemed with 
religious life and religious zeal, without at all ceasing to 
lack religious enlightenment. 

There is a special interest for us in that kind of Hel- 
lenistic theology which is called Gnosticism. The cele- 
brated Gnostic heretics of the second century A.D. were 
men who attempted to interpret the figure of the Christ 
so that it would fit into this system. But Gnosticism 
itself had existed long before and continued in an avowedly 
non-Christian form long after the Christian era. In any 
summary of its doctrines we must remember its composite 
origin, and not suppose that every feature of it, as now 
represented to us, was necessarily accepted by all its ad- 
herents. ‘The melancholy fate of man separated him, it 
seems, in a twofold way from that divine life with which 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 195 


he had some remote kinship. His soul while in the body 
was entangled in gross matter, and when freed from the 
body at death it was separated from the outer heaven — 
where dwelt that divine being with which, if it were ever 
to be happy, it must be reunited — by a huge system of 
concentric spheres that overarched the earth. These 
spheres were figments of early astronomy to account for 
the movements of the heavenly bodies. Each was under 
the sway of its own ruler or “archon.”’ These rulers were 
originally the heavenly bodies themselves, upon whose 
supposed sway over mortal destinies the whole trade of 
the astrologer was founded, but they resembled the general 
company of spirits or demons, neither gods nor men, with 
whose ways magicians were conversant. They might be 
thought of as malignant powers whom the right spell, if 
one knew it, would control, or as neutral and indifferent 
powers whom it would propitiate, or, it seems, there might 
be a pair of them, good and bad, to each sphere. In any 
case the only way of escape lay in the possession of Gnosis 
or knowledge. But it must not be supposed that knowl- 
edge meant that exercise of the reason which a man like 
Aristotle, with his religion fading, still regarded as the life 
of the immortal in us, which every man up to his capacity 
ought to live. It meant, on the contrary, the possession 
of certain information which had long ago been given 
into the keeping of certain priests or sages. Doubtless 
there existed a tendency to puta better interpretation 
upon the affair, but certainly Gnosticism in many of 
its forms dealt in a lore as to the spells — such as calling 
him by a string of little-known and outlandish names — 
by which a formidable spiritual power could be won to 
one’s purposes, whether in this life or in the dreaded 
pilgrimage after death. 

The literature that scholars put before us as illustration 


196 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


of Gnosticism belongs to various and uncertain dates 
and is, above all, fragmentary. It contains praises of 
some deity which recall the Bible; curiously enough, some 
of the amplest of these occur in connection with such 
petitions as: “Protect me from enchantments .. . give” 
me success in lawsuits ... make me victorious... 
make me fascinating to women . . . my will be done.” 
At the other end of the scale might be quoted exhortations 
to virtue which contrast with Jewish and Christian teach- 
ing in one respect only — perhaps the most important — 
namely, that they are merely negative. Taking the move- 
ment at its best, we may guess upon the whole that it 
never succeeded in making the identification of the divine 
with the righteous quite loud and clear; and further, that 
as the great Greek philosophers themselves were upon the 
edge of doing, it valued what we may call morality as an 
element in the detachment of the mind from those material 
things which it refused to regard as the works of God. 
Unlike those great philosophers, Gnostics seem to have 
been inclined to suppose that the mind apprehended di- 
vine things in moments not of its greatest energy but of 
its least, and in states of trance in which the perception 
of things of sense was suspended. Visions and ecstatic 
states seem to have been much valued — a point in which 
no doubt Gnostics resembled a large part of the early 
Christian community. They spent, however, great men- 
tal industry in seeking some solution for the question — 
not, as we should put it, of the origin of evil, but of how 
the divine being ever demeaned itself to create a world at 
all, and that a world of matter, of change, of death, and 
moreover of sex. The solution of the question was sought 
in some first offspring of or emanation from the divine 
being, and in the progeny of this son or emanation. In 
the detailed working-out of the story there was scope for 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 197 


that whole cosmography of the spheres, for the subor- 
dinate divinities of diverse mythologies, for figures drawn 
from myths of Plato, — which that good man can never 
have intended to be so used, — for such conceptions as that 
of ‘“Nous”’ or “Logos” or reason, and for all the first an- 
cestors, Adam and many more, from whom various peoples 
had traced the descent of the human race. Much of this 
piecing together of bastard physics and metaphysics with 
fairy tale that had lost its savor was governed by a motive 
which commands sympathy and respect; it was to bring 
the varied religions which different branches of mankind 
cherished into harmony with one another and with 
philosophy. 

These last observations apply no doubt to many who 
would not be classed as Gnostics.. And there were others 
besides Gnostics who looked not only for a history of how 
man descended from the Divine, but for a channel of com- 
munication through which man might receive the means 
of returning whence he came. Gnosticism in particular 
was inclined to look for some divinity or semidivine being 
through whom had been delivered to men of old the saving 
knowledge which might guide its possessors back. Such 
was the function of Hermes Trismegistos (“‘Three-times 
greatest’’), who became closely associated with or iden- 
tified with the Egyptian Thoth, and became also the sub- 
ject of some celebrated but as yet only partly interpreted 
literature. The original Greek Hermes, among his many 
and varying attributes, had been the messenger of the 
gods and also the guide of the souls on their way to the 
underworld. The question arises how far he was now 
regarded as the guide of every individual soul that escaped 
from this material world into the world of the divine. So 
far as existing information goes, he was never exactly re- 
garded as this. He became a favorite object of invocation 


198 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


in prayer, and he figures as the bringer of the original 
revelation from which saving knowledge might be derived. 
There, however, — in all that we hear of him, — his func- 
tion ends; the individual possessed of that knowledge 
finds his own way with its help. 

It does not appear, therefore, that this great personage 
of Gnostic theology presents closer analogies to the figure 
of the Christian Saviour than did the special deities of the 
more famous cults to which we must next turn; indeed 
these latter are in one way more like to that figure, in that 
they were regarded as the heads or lords of great brother- 
hoods of men. In each case the broad resemblances to 
Christianity and the broad differences are easily enough 
seen, and little importance attaches to the presence or ab- 
sence of some mark of resemblance which may or may not 
prove on closer inquiry misleading. But it may be well 
at this point to say that the particular idea or sentiment 
associated with the word, “Saviour,” is not, as some schol- 
ars have suggested, to be found in the case of the cults 
about to be mentioned, any more than in the worship of 
Hermes. It is a curious example of a readiness to overdo 
resemblances — which should not, on the other hand, be 
belittled — that in the texts cited on this particular point 
the actual word used of the deity in question is not 
“Saviour” but “Saved.” | 

Except that the same mind was often open to both in- 
fluences, there is no clear connection between this occult 
science and the famous mystery religions which had first 
arisen under more primitive conditions of life and could 
appeal more widely to human nature. These latter dif- 
fused themselves from widely distant places of origin 
and preserved their separate existence, yet they were not 
opposed to one another. They overlapped and inter- 
mingled; each was in outward respects indistinct and 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 199 


variable; and we may speak of them under one head, 
since men who practised one or another of them did so. 
A summary statement about them will be sufficient if it 
gives enough prominence to the reasons for which one or 
more of them might be thought to have influenced Chris- 
tianity very early. 

The name, “mystery religions,” signifies that in all 
these cults there were, among those who might participate 
in their ceremonies, inner circles of devotees admitted by 
rites of initiation, — or more often by a succession of such 
rites, — the nature of which was not to be divulged, into a 
closer fellowship with the deity or deities concerned, and 
into a knowledge of divine matters and an enjoyment of 
divine benefits in which those outside had no part. In 
every case the worship was associated with the belief in a 
future life, and the benefit promised to the initiated was 
chiefly, if not entirely, the securing of divine favor instead 
of divine vengeance after death. In every case the doc- 
trine of a future life had become the chief association of 
the myth round which the worship centred, though cer- 
tainly in some cases its original associations had been with 
such matters as the abundance of crops or the fertility of 
flocks and herds. 

The chief type of myth around which mystery religions 
centred was one that appeared also in many forms of 
worship which do not seem to have acquired the same 
mystic character, and which remained centred round some 
one famous shrine. It was plainly symbolic of the death 
and renewal of vegetation year by year. The great god- 
dess round whose shrine the Eleusinian mysteries arose 
was called literally “Mother Earth”; the yield of the 
earth was represented by her daughter, who was carried 
off by the god of the underworld, for whom she mourned, 
and who in time was restored to her. Elsewhere the 


200 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


beloved one whom the great goddess lamented and re- 
covered was a young paramour, Adonis, Thammuz, or 
Balder. In some places the goddess of the myth is not 
the fertile earth but the spirit of fertility and reproduction, 
or of love, or of lust. Elsewhere again she is to be found ~ 
surprisingly identified with a goddess also stated to be 
the moon, perhaps also frequently described as a virgin. 
The explanation is, of course, that the religion of every 
neighborhood or every tribe, though ready to admit many 
gods, tended to bestow its worship on one great divinity, 
— curious as it may seem, this great divinity was in a 
large part of the world female, — and that this one great 
power might naturally have any number of different 
functions ascribed to it. The younger being, generally 
male, associated with the goddess, is in a sense a subor- 
dinate figure but tends to attract more enthusiastic atten- 
tion from the worshipers, for he is not exactly a god at 
the beginning, but a mortal raised to immortality, a link 
between the human and the divine. It must be added 
that when this being is distinctly the goddess’s paramour 
what happens to him is not necessarily death and revival ; 
Attis, the consort or attendant whom the Phrygian Cybele 
soon brought after her, when she was transported to Rome 
in the shape of a large black stone to help against Hanni- 
bal, had been unfaithful to her; he then with his own 
hand deprived himself of his virility, but finally was healed 
of his self-inflicted mutilation. Sometimes, as the tale 
seems to have been told, he died of his wound and was 
revived; sometimes the goddess herself inflicted the 
mutilation upon him. The explanation and attendant 
circumstances of the whole transaction were related in 
various fantastic and unpleasing forms. Thus this one 
type of myth fluctuated from clean and beautiful shapes 
to shapes which were more or less obscene. 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 201 


Similarly the worship which attached to it must not be 
thought of as ever wholly beautiful or as prevailingly ob- 
scene, but as readily taking a higher or a lower bent or one 
that was merely extravagant or ludicrous. This was more 
particularly so with the worship of Isis and Serapis — 
often identified with Osiris — which the first Ptolemy 
established at Alexandria, as the common worship of his 
subjects, but which had come to Rome before the Chris- 
tian era, and which was practised with great pomp at 
Cenchrea, the port of Corinth, very likely by the time 
when St. Paul was there. Greek was its official language, 
and it is said to have been instituted with the help of priests 
from Eleusis, who doubtless imparted to it something of 
the character of the Eleusinian mysteries. But it took its 
main materials from Egyptian mythology, and its Egyp- 
tian priesthood are alleged to have prided themselves on 
adapting this interpretation of it to the different tastes 
of different worshipers. It is clear that they were not 
always averse to exacting large payments for initiation; 
but it is also clear that some of them impressed those who 
paid these fees as venerable, benignant, and holy men. 

The wide range and influence of this cult was rivaled 
or surpassed by that of the Phrygian rites. Phrygia was 
probably the original home of a mystery movement which 
had swept over Greece many centuries earlier. Practised 
under some restraint in Rome when they were first do- 
mesticated, these rites began to break out there with 
greater splendor of public pomp and with wilder excesses 
on the part of initiated votaries during the very years of 
the first Christian missionary journeys. They seem to 
have been marked above all by undisciplined emotional- 
ism— the strange but familiar state of mind which may 
pass readily from self-indulgence to self-mortification and 
back again. Besides drinking the blood of victims or 


202 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


bathing in it, enthusiastic worshipers would flog them- 
selves, gash themselves with knives, occasionally castrate 
themselves. But the cult could lend itself to a sort of 
wild asceticism without gaining repute as a school of 
virtue. It was in this religion that the “taurobolium,”’ 
afterwards copied by the worshipers of Mithras, is first 
known to have been practised. We hear of it first in 
later days than those of St. Paul, but it and its symbolism 
probably belonged to earlier times. It consisted in the 
slaughter of a young bull ona grille, under which a wor- 
shiper had laid himself to be drenched with the blood 
and thus to qualify for a blessed immortality. 

But obviously a mystic lore about an after life might 
be attached to other kinds of myth than those connected 
with vegetation; myths concerned with heavenly bodies 
that set and rise again would do equally well. Nor, in- 
deed, were the creeds which traveled far with the move- 
ments of soldiers, of merchants, and of slaves, and which 
added to the ferment of religious ideas in the widening 
world of that time, necessarily of the “mystery” type 
because in the loose modern sense they might be mystical. 
There was a great Syrian goddess, quite distinct from her 
of Phrygia, whose attributes seem to have been various 
and uncertain, though in the far distant lands to which 
she traveled, they appeared on the whole discreditable. 
In Syria itself, on the very confines of Palestine and around 
and in the heart of the city where Paul first testified to the 
Christ, all manner of myths and doctrines met and min- 
gled. Baalim might be collectively revered as the host of 
heaven, or a local Baal, lord of the soil in his own locality 
as well as of the sky, might be associated — in this case 
as the predominant partner— with a divine lady. But 
of Baal or Baalim or the Dea Syra, as also of the deities 
who were not Syrian but Pheenician, and of the identifi- 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 203 


cation or connection of any of them with other gods or 
goddesses, the learned report nothing but confusion. Cer- 
tain it is that Syrian religion excited horror by general 
voluptuousness, by organized and consecrated lust, and 
by the atrocity of human sacrifice. It would be a very 
false inference that it never struck chords to which the 
wholesome and the higher feelings of men responded ; but 
it should be noted that a Jew, not less than an old- 
fashioned Roman but rather more, would be apt toregard 
all the religions which we have mentioned in the lump, 
and to judge of the lump by the worst features of the 
worst of them. 

The religion of Mithras, distinctly a mystery religion 
disposed to have friendly relations with other mystery 
religions and to borrow from them, yet stands apart. It 
came from Persia and is thought to have been confined in 
the Apostles’ time to its native country and a few small 
colonies of Persians in Western Asia. Moreover, its far 
progress a little later is thought to have been chiefly in 
relatively northern regions. It 1s, of course, owing to 
an accidental result of the Roman army-system that we 
find a temple of Mithras marked on the Ordnance map 
of Northumberland. But around the year 150 it was 
widely enough known for Justin Martyr, in writing to An- 
toninus Pius, to speak of the resemblance contrived by the 
devil between its rites and the Holy Communion. And 
whenever it began to spread we must suppose that Per- 
sians as well as “‘ Parthians and Medes and Elamites”’ came 
to Jerusalem. The history of the figure called Mithras 
is entirely bewildering. But we may take it to have stood, 
_ during the great period of this religion’s course, for the 
principle of light — light physical, intellectual, and moral, 
waging long and hard, yet in the end victorious, conflict 
against the principle of darkness. Mithras is a single 


204 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


figure, not the lord or the fondling of any companion god- 
dess, but a warrior in a high cause, inured to hardship 
and grief, not altogether difficult to compare with the 
suffering Redeemer. His rites had a certain austerity. 
His votaries — chiefly or only men — were vowed to 
brave, true, honorable, clean and continent life. His 
religion has been described as a great religion for a soldier ; 
and the limitation to its attractive power, at the first and 
at the last, lay probably in the hard fact that we cannot 
all be soldiers. 

The greatest vogue of the mystery religions belongs to 
the third century a.p. The numerous inscriptions lately 
found bear witness to their wide range and their profound 
influence on individuals, but seem to be generally un- 
dated; and there may be some uncertainty as to when 
and where any one of them really possessed some par- 
ticular feature ascribed to it. Nevertheless, the proba- 
bility would seem to be that, at the time which concerns 
us, an intelligent, traveled Jew, especially one upon a 
mission to the Gentiles, would have had his attention 
arrested by almost all the characteristics, impressive to 
us, which these religions or any one of them exhibited.? 
Only we must not take it for granted that these were the 
only or the chief things that struck them in the religious 
life of the pagan world. 

One of these characteristics was that such religions 
afforded to men in humble position, to dwellers among a 
strange people, to slaves, to citizens of a once free state 
now powerless to resist or influence the command of a 
single overlord, fellowship in a far mightier community, 
fellowship bearing with it the delights of equal comrade- 
ship with other men and of conceived intercourse with 


1 Tt is surely not improbable that our Lord, living on the confines of Syria and 
of Phcenicia, was well aware of the general features of mystery religions. 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 205 


the Divine. They brought also an immortal hope, solace 
enough for much earthly sorrow; appeasement of that 
haunting dread of death which paganism, so often as- 
sumed to have been joyous, seems to have fostered to a 
degree of intensity rare among ourselves. They offered, 
on some terms, forgiveness of sins, whether those sins 
were infringement of some rule of superstition or recog- 
nized moral offenses. ‘They had baptisms to purify, and 
common meals in which, though the paten might be a 
tambourine and the chalice a cymbal, the god was held 
to participate, and which might be thought of as antici- 
pating a heavenly banquet to be shared with him. Stress 
was laid on the efficacy of blood to purge away sins; the 
drinking of it — in this case literally — imparted a spirit- 
ualsupport. ‘The eating of sacrificed flesh gave spiritual 
sustenance. To the amount of correspondence which it 
is possible to trace between these ideas and Christian 
sacramental doctrine no limit at first presents itself, except 
that it seems to be definitely mistaken to say that cere- 
monial eating and drinking were ever regarded as the par- 
taking of the substance or the life of the god. That god 
was in some sense an intermediary between God and man; 
he had died, he was risen, and as St. Paul said, ““Ye be 
risen with Christ,” so at a rather later time some pagan 
initiate said, “‘I have risen with Osiris.”” It may well be 
possible to add, without being fanciful, to the list of re- 
semblances between Christianity and these religions. 
But it is already full enough and I[ hope strongly enough 
stated to show why many people think that Christianity 
borrowed from the others much of what we commonly 
think its essential character. 

Before we pass from this rough survey of the mystery 
religions we ought to ask whether we have any means of 
judging how far their influence on life was good. We must 


206 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


not assume that they generally lent themselves to gross 
abuses. We know that men of noble character could find 
in them elevating thoughts. Many of us, even of those 
who think that civilized men may pass beyond the reli- 
gious stage to something better, are apt to speak as if re- 
ligion in all its forms was a single thing, demanding 
always high respect. And there is doubtless much truth 
in this; doubtless, apart from some abnormai degrada- 
tions of it, religion in general signifies the presence of 
some thought which takes a man outside his lesser self and 
his pettier interests. Yet there seem to be many indi- 
vidual cases in which addiction, apparently sincere, to the 
cause of the highest religion has a baneful influence; and 
such instances put us on our guard against thinking too 
indiscriminately of “religion”? in the lump. None of the 
doctrines or sentiments which have been mentioned as in 
some sense common to Christianity and the mystery re- 
. ligions has necessarily an ennobling effect. Belief in im- 
mortality has, I venture to think, generally grown with 
the growth of serious thought; paradoxically it does not 
generally connote an undue preoccupation with imagined 
concerns of the future, but a due intensity of regard for 
certain things present to us now; yet certainly in some 
cases it does take the former shape, and there have been 
religious movements and schools which have encouraged 
it to do so. When it does mean the morbid extension 
into another world of an already excessive interest in our- 
selves, or perhaps merely a childish appetite for misinfor- 
mation about what we are meant not to know, few things 
can be less admirable. Again, in some form the con- 
sciousness of sin that needs to be forgiven is, I believe we 
all find, a necessary element in any sustained effort to 
lead a life worthy of a man; yet it is obvious that what 
may be described in almost the same words may be some- 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 207 


thing merely contemptible. It all depends on what you 
take to be the real sins, or how you conceive of the offended 
Power, and what sort of propitiation you think that Power 
capable of accepting. Broadly speaking, it seems that 
every element which we think characteristic of the higher 
religions is capable of perversion into something utterly 
unwholesome, or perhaps we should say is liable to be 
counterfeited by something utterly unwholesome. It 
has not, I should suppose, often happened that an ener- 
getic or a long-enduring religious movement has been 
founded chiefly upon unwholesome feeling or tended 
chiefly to make men abject. But there is a well-marked 
type of mind which seeks for itself a border zone where 
reason and unreason, high emotion and sensuousness or 
sentimentality, the childlike and the childish, the noble 
and the ignoble, the clean and the tainted, the unselfish 
and the selfish can more or less comfortably cohabit. 
And, clearly, those mystery religions with which it is 
sought to compare Christianity had no strong tendency 
to disturb the peace of such minds. 

We now possess writings by only two men, Plutarch 
and Apuleius, who speak of the mysteries with decided 
sympathy and with inside knowledge as initiates. But 
all that we know tends to confirm the impression which 
their testimony conveys. Plutarch is the noble and sim- 
ply pious Greek gentleman that we know in other con- 
nections; he is well aware of the difference between super- 
stition and religion— indeed, we owe the distinction 
chiefly to him; but at the same time he is easily pleased 
with a nonsensical sort of symbolism and is delighted to 


accept the claims of priestly castes to have inherited 


secret stores of ancient wisdom. He and his wife have 
derived from the mysteries a spiritual peace and consola- 
tion in sorrow which other people lack. Nevertheless he 


208 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


warns his readers plainly that the mysteries lend them- 
selves to wrong interpretation; great good is to be got 
from them, but upon condition that he who seeks it takes 
with him philosophy as his “mystagogue,”’ that is, as the 
guide and interpreter who really initiates him. Read in 
connection with Plutarch’s own avowal of gratitude for 
what the mysteries have been to him, this single warning 
does away with any idea that the mystery cults set forth 
with energy any specially noble or worthy type of religious 
thought. 

We may be prepared then for a less solemn view in 
Apuleius, who took with him as his guide no philosophy 
worth mentioning, only a light-hearted, gallant, and 
kindly zest for life with all its varied incidents — a person 
whom it is impossible not to like, but with about the least 
degree of deference that is compatible with liking. Inthe 
Metamorphoses he tingles with eagerness to let out all he 
can of the secrets which he is sworn to keep. In the 
Apologia a charge — presumably not very formidable — 
of sorcery has given him an evidently welcome chance of 
further innocent self-display. It is not to be suggested 
that the mysteries corrupted him, or that they failed to 
arouse in him poetic and reverent thought. He cheerfully 
pays the large fees which his initiators do not fail to ex- 
tort from him, and does so, we may believe, not wholly 
because he will extend his connection as a lawyer. He 
takes chastity vows no less cheerfully, and presumably 
keeps them. When he imagined Isis as revealing to him 
her real identity with awful cosmic powers venerated 
from of old under ten other names, doubtless 


A thought arose 
Of Life continuous, Being unimpaired, 
That hath been, is, and where it was and is, 
There shall remain. 


THE GENTILE ENVIRONMENT 209 


But the whole episode in which this talk of mysteries 
occurs is but the appropriate conclusion of a nonsense 
tale. It is in keeping with his chatter in the Apologia 
about that obscene bag of tricks which he had collected 
as a precious hoard of charms and mystic emblems. 
Honor to any exponent of the so-called “joyous” pagan- 
ism of those days who was not too portentously heavy- 
hearted. But if, as seems certain, he was quite a favora- 
ble example of the average initiate, mystery religion had 
nothing to boast about in an intellectual or a spiritual 
regard. 

Over the face of these turbid waters the Spirit of God 
brooded. The indeterminate morality of these much- 
talked-of theologies and cults and the almost touching 
imbecilities to which they lent themselves need not blind 
us to the many ways in which their followers may be said 
to have been seeking God, “if haply they might feel after 
him and find him.” 


Note: I should not like to enter upon my argument in the next 
chapter without referring the reader to books where the opposite 
view to mine is upheld. Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos (and ed., 
1921) is the completest statement of such a view. Reitzenstein’s 
publications are of no less importance, especially in regard to Gnosti- 
cism, as to which see especially his Poimandres, an edition of a part 
of the curious collection of pagan Gnostic writings called the Corpus 
Hermeticum. His view as to the date of this is disputed, and so there- 
fore is his view that the very early and odd book, the Shepherd of 
Hermas, included in most editions of the Apostolic Fathers, borrows 
ideas from Poimandres. It does not however matter in the least for 
my purpose in the next chapter what sources Hermas borrowed from: 
for of course there was a borderland between Christianity and pagan- 
ism. A student interested enough in the matter should read, besides 
the main text given by Reitzenstein, the document called the “‘ Naas- 
senerpredigt,” which he also prints. ‘Those who do not know either 
German or Greek will probably find the best English statement of 
views opposed to mine in Dr. Percy Gardner’s books, — always to be 


210 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


read with interest and respect, — especially perhaps Exploratio Evan- 
gelica and A Historic View of the New Testament. 

As a general account of the mystery religions in their whole course 
(with no distinct opinion given on the present controversy) Franz 
Camont’s The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism, translated and 
with an introduction by Grant Showerman, is excellent and very © 
interesting. As to books written from the point of view taken by 
myself, Chapter V of Part III of Dr. Stanton’s The Gospels as Historical 
Documents seems to me extremely good. ‘The essay on “‘ The Gnostic 
Redeemer” in Dr. Edwyn Bevan’s Hellenism and Christianity is also 
valuable. I suppose I should tremble before recommending a writer 
of such very decided orthodoxy, but in this, as in so many other 
branches of learning, Bishop Gore treads with very sure feet. (See 
Belief in Christ and The Holy Spirit and the Church.) 

Really, however, a broader view of the life and thought of the time 
is wanted. Dr. Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus 
Aurelius (Macmillan) is the best single book for this purpose (though 
its title may not suggest it) and is first-rate. Dr. E. Bevan’s essay 
(as well as the others) in Studies in the Hellenistic Age, a little book 
recently published by the Cambridge University Press, is also admi- 
rable. And I cannot help referring to the new and very good trans- 
lation of Epictetus by Dr. P. E. Matheson (Oxford University Press). 
I speak with an indistinct recollection of Paul Wendland’s Dive 
Romisch-Hellenistische Kultur (not, so far as I know, translated) ; 
but it is a book of great interest, in which a reader desirous to confute 
my next chapter might find support. 


XIII 
PAGAN INFLUENCES ON CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE 


Wuat was the chief effect produced upon the thought of 
the early Christian Church by contact with this curious 
world of Gentile theology ? We can trace clearly enough 
the influence of pagan religions upon the practices and 
the general tone of Christianity in later centuries, when 
the Church could aspire to dominate the Empire and to 
win the nominal adherence of all its inhabitants, but 
with a good deal of competition on the part of the greater 
mystery-cults. But that has nothing whatever to do 
with our present question. We have here to consider 
developments which were substantially effected within 
twenty years of our Lord’s death at the outside, and most 
likely within less than seven years. And the question 
which we have to ask seems to some people very elusive. 
Christian teachers, with their own ideas not fully shaped, 
had to meet the questions which Hellenized Oriental and 
Orientalized Greek minds were specially prone to ask, 
and to deal with cravings of human nature in the partic- 
ular form which they took in those minds; and more- 
over, they had to translate, expressing in one language 
thoughts — not yet fully grasped — which had recently 
come to them in another language. The terminology 
available for the purpose in the two languages by no 


212 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


means corresponded. Powerful associations stirred by 
certain words in those who habitually used the one lan- 
guage might simply not exist for those who spoke the other. 

Now these two causes, and especially the latter, pro- 
duced very extensive results, as we can easily see if we - 
think of the names or titles applied to our Lord in 
different parts of the New Testament. “The Christ,” 
that is, “the Messiah,” a title of much significance to a 
Jew, becomes “ Christ’? —a proper name, which has 
lost its original meaning almost as much as the name 
“Jesus,” but has acquired new and powerful associations 
in the process of doing so. The title, “Son of Man,” 
disappears, chiefly, we may suppose, because the Greek 
language, unlike our own, offered no really intelligible 
equivalent for the original Aramaic or Hebrew; and we 
may well ask what, if anything, has taken its place. 
The whole process of change which this illustrates is 
very interesting. But was not a much more profound 
change than this produced in the character of Chris- 
tianity? Did St. Paul and others simply think out more 
fully the meaning of the Christian message under the 
compulsion and with the inspiration of having to bring 
it home to Hellenistic minds and to meet Hellenistic 
questionings and cravings? Or did they— that is, St. 
Paul and his friends, or perhaps before his conversion 
those churches of Jew and proselyte Christians in Da- 
mascus, Antioch, Tarsus perhaps, and elsewhere, it may be 
a section of the original Church in Jerusalem — did they 
do something which was really quite different ? Did they 
really put out of sight to a large extent what Jesus said 
and did, and by asubtle process, deliberate or unconscious 
or half one and half the other, substitute for the real Jesus 
an ideal, that is, an untrue figure, whose attributes, func- 
tions, and relations to God and man were largely derived 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE = 213 


from conceptions current in Hellenistic theology? This 
broad distinction between two possible proceedings is surely 
plain. Was the development of doctrine which we can 
trace in the New Testament substantially due to borrow- 
ing Hellenistic ideas, alien to the actual teaching of Jesus 
and the impression which His presence wrought on Jewish 
disciples? I think we have sufficient material for an- 
swering decidedly that it was not. The evidence some- 
times supposed to prove that it was proves nothing of 
the kind, and what we do know of the men supposed to 
have fashioned their creed in this way makes anything 
of the kind most unlikely. 

The view which I am rejecting is, of course, widely 
received, and I cannot here discuss it minutely, but 
before serious teachers speak as if it were proved they 
ought, I think, to make some close and critical scrutiny 
of the actual arguments of those who they think have 
proved it. I mean no disparagement of the laborious 
scholars who have made the attempt to prove it. Herr 
Wilhelm Bousset’s Kyrios Christos (second edition, 1921), 
if I may take it as an example, is a sustained and resolute 
attempt to prove it, distinguished by the exactness with 
which the writer states the real evidence upon which his 
contention is based. But for this very honorable reason 
it must be examined very carelessly if one is to escape 
seeing the insufficiency of the foundation to the soaring 
structure reared upon it. I cannot resist the impression 
that the liberal students who take Bousset’s (or some 
substantially similar) theory for proven have been per- 
suaded, not by him or his fellow laborers at all, but by the 
startling effect at first produced on most of us when 
we learn in how many points mystery religions (or reli- 
gions which can be associated with them) did resemble 
Christianity. 


214 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


On me, I confess, that effect has been very startling; 
but it is one which begins to dwindle as soon as I begin 
to ask whether there were not sources quite other than 
these pagan cults, from which the first Christians might 
have derived at least as easily the features of Christian 
belief and worship which are in question. There was 
their own Jewish religion with its observances. There 
were certain things which they firmly believed about 
their own Lord and Master — not to dwell here on (what 
nevertheless should be remembered) a large stock of 
sentiments and associations of ideas that seems to be 
pretty general among mankind at large: the association 
of water with purification; of blood with life; the as- 
sociation of conviviality, gay or solemn, with loved per- 
- sons present or absent. And then at once occur several 
of these points of resemblance, collectively impressive, 
which Christianity not only may but must have derived 
from one or other of the two chief sources just men- 
tioned, or from an influence which cannot be overlooked, 
the inevitable combination of the two. 

To begin with a small point: Some or all of the mys- 
tery religions may have used a rite which, we will assume, 
corresponded closely with baptism; this does not alter 
the fact, of which many people may not be aware, that 
the Jews of our Lord’s time used baptism as a necessary 
part of the admission of a convert to their community, 
and that they gave it significance somewhat closely sim- 
ilar to that which Christians have given to it. Again, 
though mystery cults certainly used for their purpose 
the joint partaking of food and drink, yet the Jews no 
less certainly partook solemnly of one loaf and of one 
cup. And if in the mystery communions a more than 
mortal guest may have been held to partake in the meal, 
— which was probably not the Jewish idea, — yet apart 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 215 


from any question as to who reordained this feast for 
Christians, could the first disciples conceivably have 
forgotten that One unseen, whom they thought of as 
living, had partaken with them of the Passover and of 
many another less solemn meal? Again, if the prom- 
inence of sacrifice in what we hear about the mystery 
religions and of the idea of sacrifice in Christianity con- 
tributes, as | think it does, to the general effect of resem- 
blance, we may remember the prominence of sacrifice in 
the actual observances of Jews at Jerusalem and the 
prominence of the idea of sacrifice in the Scriptures which 
they read. And here we may remark two things further. 
First, in the Jewish religion, though not in any other, 
the idea of atonement made to God threw into the shade 
the idea (said to be more primitive) of a meal shared 
with a god. In the earliest Christian books, when sac- 
rifice is mentioned the idea is exclusively that of atone- 
ment. Secondly, the mystery religions seem to have 
been permanently wedded to these observances, while in 
Judaism there was a long-standing tendency to recoil 
from their elaborate, possibly also from their sanguinary, 
character, and above all from their tendency to obscure 
the need for amendment of men’s lives. Now what we 
observe in the New Testament is that the example set 
by mystery religions is in this most important respect 
quite inoperative, while the two conflicting strains of 
Jewish thought act together: sacrifice of living creatures 
is done away for the future, while the whole past practice 
thus abandoned is completely justified in the view of 
those who abandon it. All these are (comparatively, at 
least) minor points; yet, as one after another of these 
points of seeming affiliation to pagan religions is exam- 
ined, we become aware of a certain current, flowing from 
no pagan source, which is carrying the Christian Church 


216 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


along; and with attentive consideration of the New 
Testament, our sense of the power of that current is 
likely to grow. 

I have here to enter for a while upon arguments of a 
somewhat intricate kind. I am passing to the most im- - 
portant of all the parallels between Christianity and the 
mysteries, the parallel which some people feel to exist 
between our Lord Himself and the lords of other wor- 
ships. At the same time I am coming to the only two 
important instances (so far as I know) in which anyone 
claims to trace clearly the assimilation, by Christians, 
of some definite thing from mystery religions, and claims 
too that the assimilation was significant. I may say at 
once that the first seems to me one of many cases in which 
it is quite possible that Christians used a word because 
pagan worshipers used it. 

It might surprise any ordinary reader to be told that 
there was anything very strange in the application to 
Jesus Christ of the Greek word translated “Lord.” The 
English word can be used with many different degrees of 
intensity of meaning. It is used of God Himself, and it 
is used also of more than one class of men toward whom 
no very profound deference is felt to be of necessity due. 
The Greek word is even more elastic, and apparently the 
same may be said of the Aramaic word of which it is most 
likely a translation. Herr Bousset, however, believes 
that the Aramaic word (Varan or some inflexion of Mar), 
though used by St. Paul a little later, was not current in 
Jerusalem at the date when St. Luke seems to suppose it 
to have been first applied to our Lord.’ In that case 
probably it was the Greek word that was first applied to 

1 Surely in any case, whatever Aramaic word was used — like “the Lord” in the 
Old Testament and “ Kyrios” in the Septuagint — instead of “God” was used because 


It was expressive of a higher or lower degree of reverence, and deliberately chosen 
because not applicable to God alone, 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE © 217 


Him. But, the argument continues, to call anyone 
“the Lord”’ (nominative, not vocative case, and “ Lord”’ 
simply, not Lord of something) would have been a curious 
usage, demanding some precedent. The argument looks 
a little stronger when the English translation is used 
instead of the Greek word. And a precedent was at 
hand, if, as is quite likely, mystery worshipers in the part 
of the world concerned already spoke in this fashion of 
the great figure in their cult. So, it is argued, Christians 
somewhere caught it up from the mystery people. It 
should be added that this distinguished writer rules the 
importance of this point so high as to name his great 
book Kyrios Christos (Lord Christ) in honor of it. 

Now Herr Bousset’s fine candor enables every reader 
to see that he has by no means proved his case. His 
conclusion remains a mere conjecture, with some strong 
evidence against it. Still, I do not think it should be 
called impossible. I think it just possible that it may 
have been so. And what then? The supposition is this: 
Devout followers of Jesus were situated among mystery 
folk. They probably called him “the Christ,” a term 
which conveyed hardly anything to their Gentile neigh- 
bors. They found some of these neighbors calling the 
object of their own devotion “Lord.” It was a name 
expressive of high authority. Many of themselves were 
familiar with it in the Septuagint as an equivalent to 
“God.” It was suggestive to them of the attitude which 
they were prepared to take as servants and bondsmen to 
Christ. So they said, ‘““We, too, have a Lord whom we 
follow.”? What inference should be drawn from this? 
Does it tend in the least to show that their conception 
of Christ reflected their neighbors’ conception (say) of 
Attis? A much fuller comparison between the two 
“Lords” and their respective relations to their followers is 


218 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN: 


required; and this derivation of the phrase “our Lord,” 
if true, is by itself only a curious trifle. 

We may turn now to the institution by our Lord of 
the Holy Communion, of which the oldest record is the 
passage, I Corinthians xi, 23-25. It occurred first, I 
believe, to a writer whom I respect most highly, Profes- 
sor Percy Gardner, that really St. Paul dreamed it all 
(beheld it in a vision, if the phrase be preferred) in con- 
sequence of the impression made on his mind by the sort 
of mystery feasts to which he seems to allude in the pre- 
ceding chapter, in the words “‘the cup of devils,” “the 
table of devils.”” Having dreamed it, he apparently 
set up this institution among his flock in accordance 
with it, and the thing had such a success that it caught 
hold of the whole Church, and eventually writers so 
independent of his special influence as the first and 
second Evangelists substantially incorporated his dream 
into what they present to us as the record of our Lord’s 
life handed down by his immediate disciples! This is 
an imprudent, though a daring, piece of riding, and, of 
course, if Professor Gardner did not clear his fence, there 
were plenty of others out on the same chase who would 
look for convenient gaps in the neighborhood. It is 
necessary, however, to examine this bold and simple 
suggestion. 

If we take the words in our English translation, “I 
received of ‘the Lord .. 2”) it may easily occunmomns 
that St. Paul did not really receive from the Lord the 
statement which immediately follows: that the Lord 
Jesus took bread. We may say that he received it, if 
at all, from someone else, about the Lord, and that what 
he did receive (indirectly) from the Lord was the words 
which come later: “This is my body... this cup 

This do in remembrance of me.” Professor 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 219 


Gardner’s explanation of the difficulty is that St. Paul 
‘imagined or represented himself to have seen the Lord 
in a vision and to have received from Him the narration 
which he passed on. Now it has been pointed out that 
this supposed vision, of which the content is an exact 
narration of a past event, is quite unlike anything that 
we gather about the sort of visions which St. Paul or any- 
body else had. It would also seem a curious thing that 
the cup and the table of “devils”? should have worked 
this result. 

However that may be, no Greek scholar ought to see 
any difficulty in the language of this passage, or if he did, 
to see any less difficulty in the explanation offered. 
There certainly is in the passage a want of sequence, or 
of due adjustment of one phrase to another, which would 
be a marked fault in a modern English or — I suppose — 
in a Latin writer. But this is not an English or a Latin 
writer; throughout his Epistles that sort of grammatical 
consideration troubled St. Paul almost as little as it would 
have troubled Thucydides. On the other hand, Paul’s 
choice of single words is exact and consistent. The 
word translated “I received” and the word translated “I 
delivered’’ form the pair of correlative words which he 
used together or singly when he was speaking of the tradi- 
tion handed to him or handed on. (We meet with them 
together again when he is speaking of our Lord’s resur- 
rection in I Cor. xv, 3; and, oddly enough, they are 
followed, some verses further on, by a quite similar, if 
less marked, grammatical inconsequence.) Nothing, I 
- think, could well be more certain than that St. Paul here 
spoke of a tradition which he had handed on to the Cor- 
inthians, as he stated, years before, and which he had 
himself from the first accepted as coming from those who 
were present when the Lord took the bread and the cup. 


220 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Observe now that St. Paul has all along understood, as a 
part of that tradition, not merely that our Lord said 
certain well-known words about His body and His blood, 
but that He also gave concerning the bread and the cup — 
‘the command, “Do this ” Truly we may feel sure 
that St. Paul, when first converted, found as an estab- 
lished ordinance of the Church this carrying on of a rite 
whose institution a few years before was related in a 
circumstantial manner, a manner than which nothing 
more impressive can be conceived. 

I do not think that I am now in the least shocked or 
wounded by attempts to explain away the origin of the 
Eucharist; but perhaps I ought to be quite frank and 
confess that they strike me as one of the silliest pursuits 
that have ever entertained Reverend and Very Reyv- 
erend minds. 

It would be waste of labor to follow carefully the effort 
of any writer not otherwise distinguished by sober judg- 
ment to show that even at that early date the mystery 
influence had permeated the whole Church’s conception 
of the Eucharist and its origin. Yet there is a further 
point to be noticed. Let us turn to St.’ Mark) ihe 
commands, *““This do... » .) This’ do,” are notethere 
though the rest in substance is there. It is due to so 
great a man as Wellhausen to notice what he says on 
this point. He ignores altogether any suggestion that 
those amazing words, “This is my body,” “This is my 
blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many,” 
were not spoken!—that they were the product of fancy 
or imported from that mystery region in which, as has 

1 As an example of childish eagerness to find a new point anywhere or anyhow, it 
is worth noticing. Bousset’s contention is that our Lord cannot have said this over 
the cup. If He had said anything about the pouring out of his blood he must, Bousset 


thinks, have been so grossly theatrical as to time the words to a moment when He was 
pouring wine into the cup, 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 221 


already been said, there is no known trace of the presence 
of any such idea as the words express. But he thinks 
that St. Mark, though writing probably much later than 
St. Paul, represents the more authentic tradition, and 
that the words in St. Paul’s account which he omits were 
an embellishment of the tradition, due to the fact that 
the disciples had indeed “done this.”’ It seems to accord 
with his view of Jesus that the Master should not have 
been concerned to enjoin a commemoration of Himself. 
Now this is really a case of arbitrary guesswork. St. 
Mark, though there are sentences and long passages 
where he proceeds far otherwise, practises as a rule ex- 
treme condensation, and in this part of his book especially 
he produces thereby a great (surely not unintended) 
effect. Little can be inferred from such a writer’s omis- 
sions. In this case, when St. Mark wrote, the ordinance 
was being carried out among Christians, as by our Lord’s 
command. Indeed, since the preceding words were 
spoken over bread and wine that were being partaken of 
with a solemnity already practised by ancient custom, 
and that were to be similarly partaken of again, it is 
manifest that the words applied to loaves and cups which 
the disciples would thereafter share. ‘The words implied 
the command which followed. Mark may well have 
passed over the express command as superfluous in his 
narrative. But Jesus, expecting His crucifixion, and 
full of solicitude about what would thereafter sustain 
the flock for whom He cared and whom He was leaving, 
was by no means so likely to have thought the words of 
- command superfluous at the time. So I myself do not 
doubt for a moment that the words which St. Paul and 
the First Evangelist relate were spoken. Even if we 
admit the possibility that they were not spoken, what 
exact difference does that make? When thereafter the 


222 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


’ 


disciples met at table, they did thereafter “‘do this” in 
memory of Him, and (whether by expressly spoken 
command or not) it would have been hardly conceivable 
that they should not do so. | 

What immediately concerns our purpose is that both 
the very early use of the Eucharist among the disciples 
and certain very solemn words (commemorated in it) 
which were spoken at that Last Supper rest upon ex- 
tremely strong evidence, and the sort of argument by 
which it is attempted to displace that evidence would be 
treated with derision in any other branch of scholarship 
or rational inquiry. But we are not left with only this 
negative result, that one of the very few definite points 
advanced in favor of the mystery theory breaks down. 
There is this further: that here, from the first, there 
was implanted in the mind of the Church the thought 
of some lasting, intimate, and tremendous relation be- 
tween its members and its Founder, which these words 
of His implied, but which could not be immediately 
thought out. No attempt, orthodox or unorthodox, to 
trace the historical growth of Christian belief can be 
reasonable if the necessary influence of such a fact is 
for a moment forgotten. 

To this fact must at once be added the fact of early 
belief in our Lord’s resurrection. [ do not say the fact 
of His resurrection. Let us, for the purpose of the mo- 
ment, unflinchingly assume that He did not rise. The 
swift upgrowing amid the very first Christians at Jeru- 
salem of the conviction that He had risen is none the less 
certain. We have not only St. Paul’s statement about 
this; all that we clearly know about Apostolic times 
corroborates that statement irresistibly. It is not worth 
while to answer any suggestion that in Jerusalem some 
hearsay report of myths nebulously believed by ab- 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 223 


horred aliens, about a figure of legend or of allegory, 
counted for anything in creating the belief that a flesh- 
and-blood Being, vividly remembered, dearly loved, and 
beheld in His dying agony upon a cross, had risen and 
was alive forevermore — quite enough sles: to be fol- 
lowed to a similar cross. 

Let us now turn to the actual attitude of St. Paul 
toward mystery religions and paganism generally. There 
is no occasion to seek far afield for the influences which 
may have told upon him, for though, doubtless, certain 
questions about him are very difficult, St. Paul is on the 
whole one of the most self-revealing writers who ever 
wrote. Two influences combined were supreme with 
him. The first was that of Jewish faith, as the Old 
Testament sets it before us. Hints there are in plenty 
that he was widely versed in the strange lore— partly 
the homemade product of the rabbis, partly perhaps of 
alien origin — which belonged, so to speak, to the fringe 
of Jewish belief; but the predominance, as compared with 
this, of the Old Testament (the Jerusalem Old Testament, 
which did not include the Apocrypha) is all the more 
marked for that. These, to the entire exclusion of other 
sources of wisdom, are “oracles of God.’’ This influence 
is apparent in every page of Paul’s, subject only (and 
emphatically subject) to this, that it has all to be con- 
ceived of as in living harmony with another influence 
stronger still — that which has now been revealed to him. 
What has been revealed to him is Christ crucified, risen, 
revealed as the fulfiller, in some way, of a purpose of 
God which has been at work from the beginning and to- 
ward which the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets 
in succession had played their preparatory parts. It 
may be difficult to understand St. Paul’s conception 
of that purpose and its fulfillment ; what is certain from 


224 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


any reading of his Epistles is that such a conception 
governs all his thoughts; that in his own view, and in 
fact, Jewish religious training (of the strictest) and the 
revelation of Christ to him, transforming that Jewish 
religion, account for everything of importance in his 
teaching. 

It seems often to be thought that this Christ of his is 
not truly our Jesus of Nazareth, but the mystic Being 
of his great vision on the road to Damascus and of the 
many subsequent visions which he claims to have had. 
There is a fallacy here. In his own view the Christ 
that appeared to him was the Christ of those whom he 
had persecuted and of those earlier — and as he says, 
greater — Apostles who had followed Jesus Christ from 
the first. Nor, marked as was the difference on a def- 
inite issue which arose for a while between him and some 
of them, is there the slightest sign that on his part and 
that of his opponents there was ever any sense of dif- 
ference about the essential character of their message. 
We may wonder at first why his Epistles are so lacking in 
reference to the sayings and doings of our Lord’s life, 
and why he gave so little time (and that so late) to learn- 
ing from the chief of those who had been with Jesus. 
It is a point on which more may be said later. But the 
point to be borne in mind here is not what is absent 
from his Epistles but what is present in them; and 
that is an overwhelming sense of the significance of 
Christ’s having lived on earth (“taking upon him the 
form of a servant”’), having been crucified, and having 
risen again. Of these three thoughts, the crucifixion, in 
a way, stands out most vividly. A real flesh-and-blood 
man, really crucified a few years ago,— and on that 
account for the Jews a false claimant to Messiahship, and 
for the Greeks unworthy of remark, — revealed Him- 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 225 


self to Paul (at least, so Paul said and thought) as being 
on that same account the Messiah indeed and more than 
the Messiah. It was, he says, as a revelation, that is, a 
vision; but the whole context of the vision is an utterly 
real man “who loved me and gave himself for me.”’ 
And it is what Paul would have called “beating the air”’ 
to speculate about the nature and growth of Paulinism 
without grasping the full significance of this difference 
between his central conviction and anything that could 
ordinarily be called “mysticism.”’ 

These then were the main, the sufficient, and the 
almost exclusive sources from which St. Paul’s ideas came, 
so at least he seems to testify in every page of him — his 
allegiance to the old strict Judaism and his allegiance to 
Christ, which have become to him one and the same. 

With this allegiance, Paul takes up a position toward 
paganism generally which is quite simple and very plain- 
spoken. We had better at once recall that many ideas, 
very strange to us, which entered into various creeds and 
cults of the Hellenistic world, were not peculiar to them 
but formed part of a large common ground which the 
majority of Jews (including the strictest) might share with 
them. Any Jew might easily accept the view of the 
universe as a system of concentric spheres circling the 
earth, but with a highest heaven outside them all. As 
for the legions of unseen beings with which Gentile imag- 
ination might people this universe, a loyal Jew might 
suppose them existent and even be interested in the queer 
lore which we may call their natural history. His theol- 
ogy could account for them easily. They might be ever 
so real, but they were no gods. They might belong to 
the angel host of God’s entirely submissive ministers ; 
or they might be evil spirits, powerless to resist God or 
to molest God’s faithful servants. Thus (though in one 


226 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


sentence he seems to do so) we need not expect that St. 
Paul, like ourselves, should steadily regard all heathen 
deities as unreal. For him they may be real enough, but 
if so, they are devils. I do not know that we can be sure 
of his exact thought about this matter, or that he always 
thought the same about it. What is certain is his attitude 
toward the worship of such beings and toward their 
worshipers. 

In one way his attitude is entirely liberal. In spite of 
their false religion, many heathen are good men, and 
though he does not attempt to form a scheme of operation 
for God’s mercy, he does not appear to have any doubt 
of God’s acceptance of them. Also he recognizes (in 
the Romans) the presence, underneath its idolatry, of 
some apprehension of the true God in the pagan mind. 
This — to attribute to him the great speech at Athens 
in the Acts— breaks out in utterances of Stoic poets 
whom he knows,! and it breaks out in many deeds of 
righteousness done “by nature”’ by men who are some- 
how “‘a law to themselves.’’ Nevertheless, as a religion, 
paganism as a whole is all wrong from the start. And it 
is to him a whole in which nice distinctions need not 
be made. Its original and all-pervading vice is described 
by him as “idolatry,”’ when we should rather expect him 
to speak first of polytheism; but this is intelligible 
enough; in principle, paganism of all sorts is a way of 
dragging down the conception of the one true God. And 
it all tends to evil. 

All the nameless vice which was prevalent among 
Gentiles seems to St. Paul the natural consequence of 
their perverted idea of God. It is perhaps not fan- 
ciful to trace in his latest Epistles some mellowing of his 
harsh tone toward the religions of the heathen as such, 


1 Tarsus had been the birthplace of seven noted Stoics. 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 227 


connected with his sense that in the strange world around 
him, dark as it is, Christ has come and Christ is conquer- 
ing. In earlier Epistles, at a time when his doctrine of 
the Christ was certainly in all its essentials fully formed, 
his repugnance to paganism generally and all its thoughts 
and ways is quite unqualified. But he moved among 
the heathen and he liked men as such; it was his mission 
to preach to Gentiles, and his letters are addressed to 
churches full of incomplete converts; so his view of the 
system that enslaved the minds of pagans did not at all 
prevent his trying to speak in a language that might go 
home to them, appealing to ideas which he shared with 
them, and imparting by his oratory new associations to 
words of which the sound was familiar. It remains un- 
mistakable that his primary attitude to Gentile rites and 
creeds was one of disgust and scorn such as we to-day 
cannot feel about things so remote from us. 

The reflection of the peculiar ideas of various Hellen- 
istic creeds can now be traced in many passages of St. 
Paul where few of us would look for them. Phrases 
which hardly give us pause, such as, “Though I speak 
with the tongues of men and of angels,” or “At the name 
of Jesus every knee shall bow,” or the several very 
natural uses of “fill”? and “fullness”? may have borne 
distinct references which we little suspect. It is possible 
that scholars may be inclined to be fanciful in seeking 
for them, possible that they really lurk where they have 
not yet been seen. In either case the significance of this 
habit of St. Paul’s is plain enough. It can be seen at 
once in these passages, especially prominent in his latest 
Epistles, where references can be discovered to the 
theology which trusted in the thing called “knowledge” 
(Gnosis), a theology which, it is evident, some minds 
tried early to combine with an acknowledgment of Christ. 


228 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


The reality of its hierarchy of “ principalities and powers”’ 
is not disputed in these passages; they are simply caught 
up into the aged Apostle’s vision of his Lord’s triumph. 
It is not quite clear that all are evil — some of them may 
be indifferent forces of nature personified, or may really 
be angels, mere messengers, of God. Still less is it clear 
that any of them are irredeemably evil; they too shall 
one day confess that Jesus is Lord. So far as they are 
assumed to be evil,— “spiritual wickedness,” that is, 
‘the wickedness of spirits,” 19 in thigh’ places) seine 
“prince of the power of the (lower) air,’’ — their impos- 
ing names add a sternness and a stress to the Christian 
warfare, but they bring with them no paralyzing fear. 
Two things in regard to them, it is evident, the Christian 
must not do: he must not pay to any angel among them 
the worship due to God and Christ, and he must not worry 
himself with terrors about any of them. However we 
may interpret in detail some texts about these beings, we 
are left in no doubt about that whole scheme of theology 
which specially concerned itself with propitiating them. 
It is science “falsely so-called,’’ a simple statement? 
which all of us who look into it can cordially repeat, 
and which agrees curiously with Plato’s view of what 
“Gnosis’”” ought to mean. For the Colossians it is 
“philosophy and vain deceits.’’ Again, very justly, it 
is consigned to the category of “endless genealogies”’ 
and of “old wives’ fables.”’ 

Such is the extreme limit to which St. Paul’s recep- 
tiveness of pagan theology extended. As to the mys- 
tery religions, they are probably specifically alluded to 
in the words “There are gods many, and lords many.” 
Apart from this phrase, which occurs in an assertion 


11 Tim. vi, 20, a verse which, on any reasonable view of the epistle as a whole, 
must belong to the close of an actual letter of St. Paul’s to Timothy. 





PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 229 


not of our Lord’s similarity to the rest but of His unique- 
ness, the chief sign in the Epistles of St. Paul of that gen- 
eral acquaintance with the mystery religions which he 
must surely have acquired is the prominent use which 
he makes of the word “mystery”’ itself, as well as occa- 
sionally of other words which suggest the idea of initiation. 
The word “mystery” had already been used of any kind 
of secret, or of mystery in our modern sense; but his 
reference to its strict technical sense is made clear by his 
going out of his way in the Philippians to make use of a 
word which could naturally be used only to denote initia- 
tion in the mystery cults, although our translation of it 
is “I have learned.”’ What he has here learned is not 
something which he should keep dark, but a secret which 
anyone might teach himself — that of bearing alike both 
sufficient wealth and want. So too that Christian mys- 
tery to which he elsewhere refers is not a secret to be kept 
by the privileged person to whom it is imparted, but a 
secret long hidden from men, now revealed to all who have 
ears to hear it, a secret to be proclaimed on the housetops. 
Sometimes perhaps it means simply the knowledge of 
Jesus Christ, but in one at least of the most remarkable 
of the passages Paul certainly gives it a more precise ap- 
plication: it is that God’s age-long hidden purpose in His 
special dealing with the Jews as His chosen nation has 
been to prepare the way for the “hope of glory’? now 
given to all nations in Christ. It is spoken of in connec- 
tion with the breaking down by Christ of “the middle 
wall of partition”’ which had long kept the outside world 
from sharing in the privilege of the Jews. If we are to 
see a special intention in St. Paul’s frequent use of the 
word, it must be that of triumphantly proclaiming the 
essential unlikeness of the Christian mystery to the rest. 

But, it may be said, St. Paul’s own mental attitude 


230 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


is not conclusive as to the main question. ‘There were, as 
Herr Bousset urges, Christians at Damascus before St. 
Paul went there, and there may have been such at Tarsus, 
and in other places that he had known far from Jerusalem. - 
What strange combinations of Gentile and Jewish cur- 
rents of thought may not have taken place in their minds 
within even a very few years after our Lord’s death and 
reported resurrection? And may not St. Paul have first 
persecuted and then been converted to the Christian 
faith of these outlying colonies — not really to the faith 
of the Church in Jerusalem, of which maybe he knew less 
than he professes? Such is Bousset’s suggestion, and to 
make it probable, he corrects statements both in the 
Epistles and in the Acts, with a reliance upon guesswork 
as against apparently good evidence, which is really worth 
observing. 

The very existence of such a colonial school of Christian 
belief, markedly distinct from that of Jerusalem, is a mere 
conjecture, and admittedly a very bold one. The only 
example from which we can judge of the probable attitude 
of the Jews of the Dispersion toward Gentile religions is 
that of St. Paul himself. The only currents of thought 
which we know to have blended in forming the early 
Christian creed are that of St. Paul himself, which we have 
just examined, and the direct tradition concerning our 
Lord that resulted in the Gospels and in certain Epistles 
other than Paul’s. When we first meet with them they 
are rapidly on their way toward complete harmony in a 
common tradition. When the Church, now widespread, 
had large numbers of Gentile converts and half-converts, 
and, as was bound to happen at that later stage, Gnostic 
and other pagan influences did really threaten to invade 
it, we find a firm and united resistance presented to 
them. And in no one definite particular in which an early 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 231 


influence of mysteries or Gnosticism has been thought to be 
observable can we find upon close observation any ground 
to suppose it. There is nothing in the whole case beyond 
that minimum of vague resemblance which at a given time 
and in a given region the thoughts and ways of different 
seekers after God might be expected to bear to one another, 
and beyond the fact that St. Paul uses the language of his 
hearers as freely as he breathes the same air. 

Thus the assumption, so often made by modern writers, 
that what the New Testament appears to tell us has been 
somehow explained away by research cannot stand ex- 
amination. On the other hand, if we read and compare 
the different books of the New Testament with a com- 
paratively guileless and unsuspicious mind, wishing first 
to understand what their writers want to say, we may find 
the growth of Christian doctrines in the Apostles’ time 
fairly easy to understand. Was it not simply the fuller 
apprehension of Christ’s original message, as men were 
forced to think it out under the pressure of their own new 
and vivid experiences of life and of the world around 
them? That is the conclusion for which I shall try to 
give an outline of the evidence in the following chapter. 

Before passing on to that subject, there is yet one broad 
consideration in relation to Hellenistic religions which I 
wish to recall. Whatever forces may have moulded the 
Christian doctrine, the speedy result was something that 
differed in startling ways from any of those religions. 
There was in this new teaching nothing at all of mystery- 
mongering or of dealing in abstruse and occult learning. 
The Christian mystery, or the Christian Gnosis, was 
something which the wisest of old had not perceived, but 
which now stood revealed to all comers. Any man might 
shut his eyes to it if he chose, but the youngest, the stu- 
pidest, nay, the worst might have prompt access to it if 


232 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


they chose. This was no departure from the spirit of 
the Hebrew prophets, nor was it really so repugnant to 
the temper of philosophy in its prime, but it was a com- 
plete departure from the spirit which almost universally. 
governed the priestly lore and the theological speculation 
of the Hellenistic age. 

We may associate it with a further difference. Attis or 
Osiris possessed but a shadowy reality — such as fairies 
had for our ancestors — for simple-minded belief, while 
more instructed belief refined them away into allegory 
or insisted upon the identity of each of them with half-a- 
dozen other personages of whom half-a-dozen other myths 
were told. But Jesus of Nazareth was a real man, whom 
men loved and long remembered. We may or may not 
suppose that His followers unconsciously came to attach 
to His remembered name attributes which belonged else- 
where, but in any case they endeavored to “build”’ their 
church “‘upon the foundation” of a perfectly real memory, 
still living in those who had actually “companied” with 
him. We may take one view or another as to thehistori- 
cal trustworthiness of those records which make up the 
Synoptic Gospels, but the image of Jesus which stands 
out from them has a living humanity which has arrested 
men’s attention ever since. ‘The profoundest theologizing 
about Him was inseparable from such simple recollections 
as that He “‘went about doing good.”’ The very essence 
of that way of commemorating Him which might seem 
most mystical lies in the force with which it has reminded 
all men since that He was actual flesh and blood. In 
short, the moment that we try to look from the inside at 
these earliest Christian origins, we see them in violent 
contrast with the character which any equally sympa- 
thetic attempt to comprehend the mystery religions forces 
us to ascribe to them. 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE § 233 


The message addressed to men of all sorts and condi- 
tions as men, in the name of a Lord who was emphatically 
man, was of course a “‘creed wrought with human hands,” 
and highly unsusceptible in certain respects of being shut 
up within ‘‘closest words”’; but in certain respects it 
was all the more peremptory and uncompromising in its 
challenge. The breach with Hellenistic theology and all 
its ways is utter. The monotheism to which the most 
elevated mind can rise is not going any more to play with 
or tolerate the polytheism endeared tothe many. “Thou 
shalt have none other gods but me”’ is an absolute com- 
mand. The objection might come — for instance, later, 
from the not very discerning minds of Mohammed and 
his followers — that the place which was at once ascribed 
to our Lord was a breach of this command, and we cannot 
stop here to inquire whether Christian theology as it pro- 
ceeded was very successful in its method of answering it. 
But we can see at once that in this very respect Christian 
theology separated itself at the start from prevailing pagan 
systems. 

Those pagan systems did indeed seek to get away from 
a polytheism which was merely barbaric or childish, and 
in either case largely immoral. They set about doing so 
by conceiving of a God to whose very nature contact with 
this lower world of matter, effort, pain, sex, birth, and 
death was repugnant. They were led on to try to bridge 
the gulf between such a God and all things else by bewil- 
dering speculations as to some “only begotten”’ emana- 
tion from this pure and remote Being, still remote from 
the world but not too remote to be the originator of a 
whole progeny of further and lower emanations. The 
result, which by these speculations they strove to make 
intelligible, was the existence here of creatures with a 
spark of intelligence akin to God, entangled in the gross 


234 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


matter of their suffering bodies, and capable of redemp- 
tion only through some gradual course of disentangle- 
ment from all that makes them what they are. Christian 


thought started with the postulate — doubtless unex-. 


plained yet definitely held — of a God whose infinite 
goodness did not make Him above creating, as with His 
own hands, all things that are, breathing as with His own 
breath life into all that live, speaking even by His own 
spirit to these His creatures, mysteriously free to disobey 
Him. And the vast gulf which Christian thought also 
had to bridge, the gulf between Him and them, was 
bridged in this way: One man, born of woman, to 
strive, to endure, to enjoy, to die in anguish, was the 
“express image of His person,” the only-begotten Son of 
God, and was that by the very fact of all the vulgar human 
sorrow concentrated in Him. This, too, was a paradox; 
and whether it was more intelligible than the Gnostic 
paradox with its successive stages of descent from God to 
man or not, it was quite different. Christian theology, 


- right or wrong, can be seen striding from the first along 


a way which is absolutely its own. 

It is even easier to see the further difference, which, 
except that it is really inseparable from this, one would 
call more important by far. The one God thus pro- 
claimed was a righteous God; He demanded righteous- 
ness, demanded nothing else, demanded it of all men, 
and according to the Christian doctrine made open to all 
men a way in which they might at least begin to share 
His righteousness. 

Of course the best heathen put the claims of righteous- 
ness as high as they could be put. It is not to be pre- 
tended that the heroism of any Christian known to us 
was more thorough-going or more genial than that of 
Socrates. Again, we need not at the moment inquire in 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 235 


what degree the best heathen conception of moral good- 
ness fell short of the Christian, either in completeness or 
in its intrinsic fitness to be made to appeal to people gen- 
erally. Yet the highest thought and the purest living of 
pagan thinkers led to no sustained effort among them to 
make popular religion one and the same thing with the 
loftiest moral aspiration. Indeed, most of them seem 
distinctly to have thought that religious traditions with a 
considerable streak of immorality in them had better not 
be disturbed violently. Christianity sought to destroy 
them at once and altogether. Nothing is more marked 
than the instant demand on action which Christian teach- 
ing treated as involved in — or rather, as identical with — 
its assertion of its faith. This was an essential element 
in Christianity from the first moment to the last of that 
development of which the New Testament gives us 
glimpses. And in this respect too, the importance of 
which cannot be exaggerated, the carrying of Christianity 
beyond the borders of a peculiar people with its peculiar 
laws was the irruption of something staringly new into 
the Hellenistic world. 

There is another aspect of this contrast which we ought 
in conclusion to recognize. Hellenistic theologizing pro- 
duced complex theories which must have demanded much 
industrious cogitation on the part of good and— in other 
respects — intelligent men, but it showed no sign as yet 
of virile effort of the intellect. Greek philosophy in its 
brief prime had laid stress upon a fundamental difference 
between two states of mind: There was the state of mind 
which really wanted truth, and there was that state which 
(outside the sphere of pressing material needs) was happy 
in superficial appearances, in hearsay, in mere fancies, 
and in the patter of imposing words. Hellenistic theol- 
ogy remained in this latter state. It might busy itself 


236 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


about the relation of Nous to the demiurge, the zons, 
and the archons; it might stoop to the homelier topics of 
the crocodile that has no tongue, the privy member of 
Osiris, and the eight dog-faced apes; but in either case it. 
came equally near to justifying Plato’s violent metaphor 
of men sitting fettered, with their backs to the light of 
reality, discussing, as it passed across the wall of their 
dungeon, the shadow of some object itself fictitious. 

We need make here no assumption about the correct- 
ness of the central doctrine of the New Testament, but it 
is unmistakable that certain of its authors had, in St. 
Peter’s phrase, “girded up the loins of their minds.” 
Their reader now may find much in them which is diffi- 
cult to understand; but in that large part which he does 
understand he must be aware that these men did mean 
with their whole souls to be real, to deal with realities, to 
stand with their feet upon the solid ground of something 
that was important and quite true, to face facts as hard 
as “cold iron out of Calvary.”’ And that governing prin- 
ciple of conduct of which I Corinthians xiii is perhaps the 
chief classical expression, but which three other writers 
of Epistles grasp no less firmly than St. Paul, marks (if 
for a moment we may regard it in a somewhat chillier 
light than we would ordinarily prefer) a fresh and a per- 
manent advance in the slow and interrupted march of the 
human intellect. 

Granted, then, that the pagan religions are not to be 
thought of with mere aversion and contempt, granted 
that they expressed genuine human aspirations and kept 
them more or less healthily alive, yet the great influence 
which reacted upon the new religion from Jerusalem and 
Galilee is not to be looked for in their somewhat lurid 
rites or their somewhat fusty creeds. There were other 
influences more familiar to us in the Hellenistic and 


PAGAN INFLUENCES ON DOCTRINE 237 


Roman world, which told upon Christianity with manifest 
force. The preachers of the Gospel did not merely 
receive the discipline of having to expound their dearest 
thoughts to people who were strangers to all their tradi- 
tions. Those strangers gave them back something in 
which they had been relatively lacking by reason of the 
intense Jewish training which fitted them to be the first 
recipients of that Gospel, yet something which they were 
well fitted to acquire. _ For if, as we may suppose, the Jew 
had generally the more robust vigor of mind, the Hellenist 
(especially the actual Hellene) had certainly the wider 
range of knowledge and interests, the more varied intel- 
lectual activities. Philosophy had long ago come to a 
pause in its attempt really to deal with the deepest sub- 
jects of speculation; and—apart from the philosophers 
—the genius of old Greece had touched upon religion 
only in so far as religious problems are necessarily the 
subject of the intenser kinds of poetry and especially of 
tragedy. But the instinct of rational discussion was 
still potent. The Stoics had handled many practical 
questions of duty and moral teaching with greater thor- 
oughness and freedom than could easily belong to the 
Pharisees. The inhabited world and the human race 
inhabiting it had become objects present to ordinary 
imagination. Conscious methods and principles of rea- 
soning and a whole arsenal of categories, abstract terms, 
and familiar distinctions and oppositions of thought 
(occasionally misleading, but as a rule eminently useful) 
formed a common property of the Hellenist world from 
which we ourselves have inherited them. We can per- 
ceive the want of them in Hebraic thought, though it 
sometimes turned its loss to gain. Study of the New 
Testament should, I think, reveal to us with what ready 
capacity the first recipients of the Christian faith took 


438 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


from Hellenism and the Empire the real gifts which these 
had to bestow. 

It is a common remark that Jesus spoke a language 
which goes straight to men’s hearts and minds every-— 
where. But we need not suppose that His first followers 
had the gift of that tongue. They could not have propa- 
gated His Gospel except by learning to be something 
more than typical Jews. And that is not all. If they 
had not got outside the little circle of their race and their 
religion, they could not have grasped what He had said 
or conceived what He was. It was in the clash of inter- 
course with that which we still revere in the Greek civili- 
zation of the Roman Empire that Christianity learned 
to speak, like Christ, a universal language. And in doing 
so it became the Christianity of Christ Himself. 


XIV 
OUR LORD IN THE FIRST THREE GOSPELS 


WE are told that our Lord began His ministry by teaching 
about the “kingdom of God”’ or “kingdom of heaven,” 
which He declared to be very close at hand. ‘This “king- 
dom” was a conception peculiar to the Jews, which would 
have meant nothing to other people. To understand 
how our Lord speaks of it, we had better note what schol- 
ars say as to the exact meaning of the words used. 
“Heaven,” in this particular connection, — though of 
course in many other connections it is not so,— is simply 
and solely a reverent way of saying “God.” The English 
“kingdom”’ does not quite correspond with the word 
which our Lord must have used. “Sovereignty”? would 
be nearer to it. The original word suggested necessarily 
a state of things in which God exercised sovereign rule, 
giving actual commands which somebody actually obeyed. 
It did not necessarily suggest a region where or a time 
when His rule would prevail to the exclusion of all adverse 
powers, though naturally it could be so used. It implied 
that men, few or many, were being governed by God’s 
known will. This obviously is a state of facts which 
might be present in very different degrees, so that at a 
given time it might be spoken of as already there or as 
still to come. Our Lord compared it to yeast, beginning 
to work in dough, and to a small seed that would become 


240 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


a great tree. He evidently played upon the strings of the 
Jewish hope of the kingdom, provoking thought and ulti- 
mately causing a complete change in His disciples’ original 
ideas. But it was no strained or juggling use of words 
that made Him speak of this kingdom sometimes as a 
thing far remote (for example, in the moving words, “I 
will drink no more of the fruit of the vine until. . . ”’), 
sometimes as a thing just about to come, sometimes as a 
thing that was there already: “The kingdom of God is 
within you.” These last-mentioned words require us to 
think of some way in which men were already beginning 
to live under the fuller sway of God, and to do His will 
as it had not previously been done. 

We may at once notice that as a matter of fact God’s 
will was then beginning to be done by some people more 
truly than ever before — that is, if we believe that there 
is a God; if we do not, we must describe the same fact in 
other words. ‘The presence of a Christian spirit or way 
of life, impossible to define but quite unmistakable, in 
some of our neighbors is a fact of which only the most un- 
fortunate or the most unobservant of us can be unaware. 
Writers in many Christian centuries down to our own 
have tried to express this spirit in words, often very well, 
and more recently with an aptness to the circumstances 
of modern times which is not to be looked for in the 
New Testament. Yet nothing in later literature quite 
compares in breadth and force and beauty to those sum- 
maries of the Christian life which have been left to us by 
Peter, Paul, and James — men very different from each 
other, but living under the felt influence of our Lord and 
referring all their thought to Him. On the whole, more- 
over, the world at large agrees in thinking the often frag- 
mentary and often obscure records of our Lord’s words 
in the Gospels more exquisite, more trenchant, and more 


a _ 


_——. 


OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 241 


final still. And without difficulty we can discover that 
this spirit of living was really something that came new 
into the world with Him. , 

It would be easy to point out the respects in which the 
highest pagan thought about life lacks, as anybody would 
feel now, something which the New Testament does not 
lack; but it is enough for our present purpose to observe 
this in the case of the thought and the spirit of life with 
which those among whom our Lord came were familiar. 
The Old Testament, of course, abounds in passages which 
have all the beauty of primitiveness, and with the sort 
of inspired sayings in which some great soul of rare eleva- 
tion seems to anticipate all that can be thereafter said. 
But let us look in it for what illustrates the prevailing 
tone of Jewish piety and righteousness when at a high 
level, by taking (say) the Book of Psalms — not a few 
picked Psalms, but the collection as a whole, or some long 
and rather late Psalm of a kind that is fairly in point, say 
Psalm cx1x. Muchas we shall find that goes to our hearts, 
it cannot escape us that the good and sincere men who 
wrote them are very much inclined to self-righteousness 
and yet are equally inclined to be unhappy in their serious 
thoughts, unpleasantly confident at one moment that they 
keep God’s laws while their neighbors do not, and terribly 
weighed down at another moment by the sense that, 
after all, they cannot fulfill God’s will. St. Paul, we 
know, had suffered under these moods. We turn to the 
Epistles in the New Testament and find that we have 
passed into an atmosphere in which self-righteousness and 
self-complacency cannot breathe, and in which, on the 
other hand, an extraordinary happiness is often displayed. 
What we can now learn about the better sort of Phari- 
saism in our Lord’s time makes it contrast with Chris- 
tianity quite as strongly. I need not further illustrate 


242 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


what could easily be proved and will not be seriously 
denied, the fact of history that at our Lord’s coming some 
spirit did breathe upon the dry bones of aac 12 ethics, 
that they might live. 

To return for a moment to the “kingdom.” He spoke 
of a mystery or secret of that kingdom as already possessed 
by the very disciples whom all the while He charged with 
their slowness in understanding what He was and what 
His coming signified. It was a secret hidden from the 
wise and prudent and revealed to babes; again, the king- 
dom, the rule of God’s will, could be received only by 
those who would turn round and become like little children. 
The secret of that life according to God’s will, which was 
now being brought within men’s grasp, was in some way 
analogous to those things which are easily learned — up 
to a certain point — by very young people, and learned 
by older people with great difficulty, with a conscious 
constraint upon themselves to get rid of much that (use- 
fully upon the whole) has become a habit with them. 
Riding 1 is a simple example. To a grown-up person who 
is being taught to ride, what he is told to do must often 
seem a combination si performances quite incompatible 
with each other, though each by itself is difficult enough. 
To a normal boy or girl, properly taught to ride as soon 
as the right stage in physical development has been 
reached, this mystery is easily and insensibly solved. 
Long practice and varied experience will be necessary if 
the child is to grow up into a really good rider, and there 
will then be no limit to progress till the decay of physical 
power has gone some distance ; but the enjoyment of riding 
comes very soon and therewith very soon the indefinable 
perception of what it would feel like to ride well. What- 
ever else the “mystery of the rule of God” involved, an 
essential part in it was certainly played by the knowledge 


OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 243 


of what (so to speak) it would feel like to live well — to 
live according to God’s will. In the larger practice of life 
it has happily proved easier for grown men and women 
to turn round and become like children than in any minor 
art, but the analogy of such minor arts readily suggests 
to us some of the reasons why it was said that the kingdom 
of God could be entered only as a little child would enter 
it. Perhaps the “eagerness of infantine desire,” the 
child’s happy self-abandonment to any pursuit that it 
can enjoy, may be the chief reason, or perhaps the frank 
confidence of a child in those who have once got its affec- 
tion and trust. We have to ask how our Lord divulged 
this secret knowledge. 

About every work of genius it is a primary fact that it 
is greater and more many-sided than has appeared in 
any one man’s interpretation of it, even in the cases where 
the interpreter too has had genius. And any attempt to 
interpret our Lord must furnish a marked example of this 
fact. In following a line of thought that may suffice for 
the purpose of our present argument, the last thing I 
should wish to do is to depreciate that of which I do not 
speak or which I do not understand. Turning first to 
what may naturally be spoken of as the simple moral 
teaching of the Gospels, I wish only to point out three 
features of it: first, the uncompromising demands which 
it makes; secondly, the width of its scope; thirdly, its 
paradoxical power of appealing to men who are very far 
from good. 

First then, our Lord, as it often seems, does not claim to 
go at all beyond the principles of action which any Pharisee 
who was a good man would have been ready to acknowl- 
edge; only He asks that these principles shall exclude all 
others. The service of God must be single. The blessed- 
ness sought by obeying God must be the blessedness of 


244 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


life according to His will. All other good things of life 
must be absolutely subservient to this ; to the utmost pos- 
sible extent we must stop making any of them our aim in 


life. Socrates had once tried to teach something very 


like this. Doubtless many a good Israelite had, as much 
as any Christian since, given his whole heart to God in 
this fashion. And yet, till our Lord taught it, this had 
never become a part of primary moral teaching, and it 
would not have seemed to be a thing which the ordinary 
man could be asked to acknowledge as a principle to be 
applied in ordinary circumstances. It had been a coun- 
sel for heroic natures in circumstances which demanded 
heroism. Never before had any number of people been 
called upon to recognize in all its fullness, as a principle 
that held good every moment and in all affairs, that “it 
is more blessed to give than to receive.” 

Next it is easy to discover that our Lord’s teaching 
does illuminate the whole field of our practical activities, 
and — what comes to the same thing — that it imparts 
some knowledge of a principle which applies everywhere 
and at all times. (It does not need a professed Christian 
to see this; perhaps no more searching exposition of 
Christian principle exists than can be found in the writings 
of George Eliot.) This, of course, is all the more true 
because, with a deliberate intention manifested in the 
reported answers to some men’s questions, He left people 
to apply their own best judgment honestly to the infinitely 
varying practical problems of their own situation at any 
given moment. 

But the Bible is less read than it was, and there has 
sprung up a fashion of speaking which demands a word 


here. It has often been said lately that Jesus Christ — 


occupied Himself with ideal principles which we cannot 
really apply in practice. By the words “‘ideal’’ and 


DURGLORD IN “THE: EARLTERS GOSPELS | 24 


“idealism” people are apt to mean pretty pictures of what 
it might be nice to do in circumstances which cannot 
exist. Surely the suggestion that our Lord was guilty of 
this kind of moral quackery is a poor way of evading the 
fact that hour by hour His words demand something 
which we generally do not do, but most certainly can do. 
Christianity, as most of us can see, really requires an un- 
common determination to see things as they are and to 
deal with them as they are. We may pass over here, 
with this brief allusion, the twisted ways in which the 
Sermon on the Mount has been read. Simple people 
have found in it, no doubt, as the most learned must, 
much that may set them wondering about its full sig- 
nificance, but they have seldom missed the broad effect 
of its requirement that personal greed, spite, irritability, 
and pettiness shall be extinguished, and that an energy 
of well-doing, self-devoted and ungrudging, shall take 
their place. 

It has been quite honestly felt by some people — for 
example, by John Stuart Mill — that the New Testament 
teaching dwelt too exclusively upon what may be called 
the gentler side of good character, to the neglect of such 
qualities as are considered more specially manly. This 
seems a curious illusion when one thinks of the demands 
which our Lord insistently made upon His actual disciples 
and of the dauntless and indomitable way in which these 
men, and great numbers of early Christians soon after 
them, did eventually behave themselves. But the illu- 
sion arises out of a feature in which our Lord’s teaching 
does really contrast with the only ethical teaching worth 
serious comparison with it. Some of the profoundest 
moral philosophy of Greece turned upon the observation 
that there seems to be, necessarily, in sound character a 
gentle and what may be called a hard side, of which the 


246 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


one or the other might predominate in a man’s native 
disposition; society and the man’s own good required 
that the gentle element should in the end be the master, 
but the other was needed too, and the development of © 
both in due proportion was the great problem of educa- 
tion. Our Lord’s teaching seems untroubled with this 
difficulty. He might seem for a moment to appeal merely 
to what might almost be called soft in human dispositions, 
but it is evident that from that tender-hearted and utterly 
unselfish devotion which He demands He expects all good 
qualities to flow in full measure. At any rate, the Gos- 
pels cannot be intelligently read without observing that 
those who followed Him were called upon to become 
careless of hardship, of toil, and of danger — moreover, 
that there was expected of them a quality not always 
prominent in men’s ideas of the saintly character, an 
absolute frankness and sincerity. 

From two points of view we have been led to notice 
how unprecedentedly and terribly exacting His require- 
ments of man seem. Yet it is the fact that, beyond all 
other teachers, Jesus Christ has been felt to have a mes- 
sage for the outcast, for the blackguard, and— let us 
mark this — for the abjectly feeble. There is no question 
that He has struck men and women in all ages in this 
light, perhaps in this light more than in any other. The 
moral law may be said to have become with Him a call 
to a service in which those who had served well would but 
aspire to serve better, and those who had not served might 
yet desire before the end to bear a part, however slight 
and obscure. 

I have begun by dwelling upon the simply ethical aspect 
of our Lord’s teaching, because historians of religion are 
in one way in danger of overlooking its importance. To 
an extent which we can hardly exaggerate, our Lord’s 


OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 247 


significance in the lives of those who first followed Him 
must have been that of one who brought within their 
grasp a righteousness which their own Jewish religion had 
made them desirous of possessing. Some of them 
had long been seeking a way of obeying the law ; some had 
been stirred by John the Baptist’s call to repentance ; 
some had felt themselves to be “lost sheep of the house 
of Israel.’’ But plainly it would be misleading if we tried 
for more than a moment to look on our Lord’s teaching 
as having been of the nature of a moral code, a set of 
rules by which to judge what particular actions are right 
or wrong. There is indeed no such.thing as simply ethi- 
cal teaching in this sense. All teaching that has influ- 
enced conduct to any good purpose has been in a broad 
sense religious, even if the religion implied has been an 
atheistic religion— for such there have been and are. 
It has in some way affected the whole tone and quality 
of men’s pains and pleasures, hopes and fears, likes and 
dislikes, hatreds and loves. Above all was this so with 
our Lord. 

It is obvious that His moral teaching cannot be dis- 
sociated from His teaching about the Father. He called 
for perfect kindness because “your Father .. . is per- 
fect’’; he calmed fear and worry with the assurance that 
that Father cares; His whole teaching has been felt by 
some to be bound up in the prayer, “Our Father.” If 
those of us who feel most lost often think of Him, no sen- 
tence of His goes further towards accounting for it than 
the words of the parable: “But when he was yet a great 
way off his father saw him.” It is not to be suggested 
that the thought of God as a Father was unknown before. 
It was known both to Gentiles and to Jews. Able Jewish 
writers who revere Jesus are inclined to suggest that little 
or nothing in His moral teaching was original. Possibly 


248 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


nothing except the power of making old thingsnew. And 
this He did to the idea of God the Father. 

But it is impossible to excise or expurgate from the 
record of Him supplied by any considerable portion of | 
these Gospels, from whatever source it comes, the thought 
which goes along with this, namely, the thought of His 
own relation to that Father and to man. And this 
thought, like that of God and His fatherhood, enters into 
the warp and woof of His teaching about life. The diff- 
culty which has been felt about the relation of Christian 
doctrine to His teaching in the Synoptic Gospels is chiefly 
due to this very fact that our Lord’s thought concerning 
Himself is thus interwoven, constantly implied, not ex- 
pressly enunciated as if a theory about His person were 
of any significance by itself. 

From the first the effect of our Lord’s ponent has been 
indistinguishable from that of His actions and His bear- 
ing. We need not assume here the truth of any particular 
story, but it was not any ungentle Being of whom the 
chief memory left was how He went about doing good; 
not of any timid or unauthoritative character that people 
said, ‘‘Even the winds and the sea obey him.” Thus 
we may say with assurance about Him two things which 
specially concern us here. They relate to His power over 
outcasts and to His power over His own disciples. I 
have alluded to the father in the parable of the Prodigal 
Son; it is an essential part of the memory which Jesus 
left of Himself that He went about among publicans and 
sinners and harlots as it can have been given to few to 
do, neither indifferent to them, nor disgusted at them, 
nor afraid of them, perfectly kind, not preaching out of 
season, yet without the disposition of some virtuous peo- 
ple to make up to the bad man with secret admiration of 
his supposed virility or to pretend to the poor devil that 





OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 249 


there is something interesting in being a poor devil. No 
less clear is the view which these Gospels give us of His 
dealing with those twelve whom He chose to be specially 
near Him; of the patience, firmness, tenderness with 
which He led them to understand Him and prepared them 
for the task to which they had been called. 

We cannot at once say from the brief and occasionally 
obscure records of Him that no one else can ever have 
shown such qualities as these in so high a degree. The 
points here to be marked are of a different kind: He did 
regard himself as standing in some incomparable relation 
to God and man; it was by and in the course of His walk- 
ing among men in the fashion which we have noted that 
He declared what He took those relations to be. It was 
not so much through any express claim of His as through 
what they saw Him to be among men and among them- 
selves that the disciples formed their belief in and after- 
ward their belief about Him. These points need but 
little illustration: “Thy sins be forgiven thee’; “This 
day is salvation come to this house”; “The Son of Man 
hath power on earth to forgive sins.’”’ (We may notice 
that it is this same Son of Man who seems thereafter to 
be coming in judgment.) Such utterances seem an in- 
separable part of His way among the outcast. As for 
His way among the disciples, it is plain that He claimed 
unmeasured authority over these His “friends’”’ and His 
“little flock,” that they accepted that authority to the 
full, and still loved Him. 

It is convenient to break off for a moment at this point 
to ask: How far did our Lord concern Himself with 
eschatology? ‘“Eschatology”’ seems to mean talk about 
the end of the world, and we at this moment, if we thought 
of the end of the world, should regard the end of any one 
country — however much one might think its destiny 


250 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


fraught with good to mankind — as in that comparison a 
small matter, though even for us a few years ago the im- 
mediate destiny of our country was a thought which 
covered the whole horizon of possible looking forward. - 
For the Jews their patriotism and their religion were 
indistinguishable, and they had been learning to look for 
an end of the world which was bound up with the culmi- 
nation of their own country’s fate. Asa matter of fact, 
there awaited that country, within about forty years, a 
catastrophe which it sickens us now to read of, and which 
to a Jew who could have foreseen it might have seemed 
an event which would leave in the world nothing worth 
having. Nor was it hard to see that this was likely. No 
talk of things to come could well avoid blending in some 
degree the destiny of Jerusalem with that of the whole 
world. 

Let us now turn to the famous Chapter xiii of St. Mark. 
I see no reason to think that it or any part of it is “a 
little Christian Apocalypse,” a solemn fancy composition 
of someone’s which the Evangelist incorporated. The 
occasion of it is stated in a lifelike enough way. But I 
observe: that it is a long and intricate sustained discourse 
of a kind quite different from any other which these Gos- 
pels contain; that no hearer could have remembered it 
with any accuracy; that the recorded hearers were most 
unlikely to have grasped our Lord’s meaning in detail at 
the time; that, as frequently understood, it makes our 
Lord deal with a subject with which He professed Him- 
self unable to deal; and that its dealing with that subject 
largely consists in that kind of awful cosmic imagery with 
which the ancient prophets had been (and, I am told, 
Jews ever since have been) wont to speak of any kind of 
terrible event. I may say that I myself thoroughly be- 
lieve that our Lord did solemnly warn His disciples of 





OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 251 


the destruction of Jerusalem, but I do not for a moment 
believe that He told them to expect the end of the world 
in their time. What I wish to say at present relates only 
to what is certain about this discourse. 

And first: if, as I believe, our Lord did speak anything 
at all like this about the future, then whether what He 
prophesied came true or not, He certainly did here as 
elsewhere turn the question which was asked Him to the 
purpose of His own practical teaching. The disciples, 
who asked a simple question about a future event, are 
not told what would have satisfied their curiosity; they 
are told to be prepared for contests, persecution of them- 
selves, every sort of public calamity, false alarms and 
false hopes and false Christs; and they are taught that 
what is necessary for them, and for others too, is alert 
preparedness and long patience. ‘This is of a piece with 
His special teaching elsewhere. A considerable part of 
our Lord’s moral teaching is special teaching of His dis- 
ciples as disciples, which often we can apply only by anal- 
ogy (though one that is easily drawn) to the case of the 
ordinary Christian since their day. The momentous, 
perilous, and exacting nature of their special calling is 
plainly put before them. That special calling, after He 
is gone and for all their lives, is still that of disciples of 
His — not as men who might in a sense be disciples of one 
who was dead and had left laws that could be obeyed, 
but as agents for an absent master who will return, it may 
be soon or it may be late, and who will demand a strict 
account. We can easily realize how great a difference 
He thus sets between Himself and (say) Moses, or anyone 
else in the course of history. 

Secondly, we must note that in some great event of 
vast significance He is Himself to return. The passage 
in St. Mark does not stand alone in this respect. That 


p17) ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


He spoke to the disciples of a coming or of comings of 
His hereafter is, I should suppose, as unquestionable as 
that He taught forgiveness or that He spoke in parables. 

I may now turn to the two well-known names which 
He accepted or chose for Himself, and one of which He 
used in this very passage. It is an essential part of St. 
Mark’s narrative! that He never directly gave Himself 
out as the Messiah; that at a certain crisis He elicited 
the belief of His disciples that He was this; that He for- 
bade them to make it public; that from that time on He 
began to tell them of the death that awaited Him; that 
He publicly confessed to being the Messiah only at the 
end, when so doing would turn the scales of judgment 
against Him. [ shall not stop to enter into the argu- 
ments in favor of accepting this most remarkable story, 
for I doubt whether any ordinary mind could swallow the 
argument that it was a fabrication. What does the story 
imply? I have dwelt already on the different ways in 
which the Messiah could be conceived of. He might be 
a mere mundane or a mere spiritual potentate, but we 
cannot suppose that our Lord could have let Himself be 
widely recognized as Messiah during His life without 
frustrating whatever great purpose we can reasonably 
ascribe to Him. The disciples, it is evident, were gradu- 
ally prepared to take in a conception of “him that was 
to come”’ which was far different from any that had been 
distinctly held before. If, however, we ascribe to our 

1 For a long time I had one deep suspicion of St. Mark’s whole narrative about the 
Messiahship. It arose solely from his representing the evil spirits as declaring Him 
Messiah. But I am convinced by Wellhausen’s comment on these incidents. The 
state known as demoniacal possession, and our Lord’s having effectively dealt with it 
must be taken as facts, however they are explained. These passages, as Wellhausen 
says, recall the amazing effect, upon those present, of scenes which they had witnessed — 
the wild, unintelligible cries of the afficted man, the commanding voice that stilled 
them. To say, as the disciples did in after years, that they had heard the devils ac- 


knowledge their conquering Lord, was a perfectly natural interpretation of an actual, 
overpoweringly impressive, experience. 





OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 253 


Lord— as | think that on any reasonable view we must — 
some clear-sighted design for what was to follow after He 
Was gone, we can see a plain reason why He should wish 
His disciples at the end to recognize Him under this title. 
If they had not so recognized Him, many of them must 
still have gone on expecting the coming of some Messiah, 
expecting a completion and fulfillment of Israel’s history 
and hopes other than that which was in fact ordained.} 
Yet in what exact sense did our Lord at the end call Him- 
self the Messiah — or, if we adopt the version of the story 
given in St. Matthew,? concede that He might so be called ? 
This much the title certainly implied: it attributed to 
Him a vast authority, greater to an undefined extent 
than any that had hitherto been exercised on earth; it 
attached to Him personally the loyalty which as true 
Jews the disciples felt toward the commonwealth of Israel ; 
it made the following of Him in itself the law of the king- 
dom that had been expected. 

It is all of one piece with His treatment of the Messiah- 
ship that He had constantly in the meantime called Him- 
self “the Son of Man.” ‘That He did so can hardly be 
calleduin question. {he name is frequent, alike in St. 
Mark and in the other chief source of the First and Third 
Gospels, not to speak of St. John where it is used equally 
freely. In the rest of the New Testament it appears 
only once, namely in Stephen’s speech, in a passage per- 
haps slightly reminiscent of our Lord’s use of it at His 
trial. It disappeared perhaps because it did not bear 
translation into Greek so well as it does into English. 
That, having thus passed out of use, it should later be 
falsely introduced into the Gospels seems incredible. 


1QOne of the greatest of recent Israelites, Disraeli, wrote some most remarkable 
pages upon actual fulfillment of Jewish ambitions by Jesus Christ, in his Life of Lord 
George Bentinck. 

2 See note on page 145. 


254 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


The ordinary English reader easily attaches to it poetical 
associations which he thinks explain it sufficiently, and 
I believe that substantially he is right; but there is a 
good deal more to be said about the phrase. “Son of | 
Man”’ is a Hebrew expression which seems to have passed 
into Aramaic speech, and which could be used as an equiv- 
alent for “man’”’ wherever it was intended to lay some 
stress on the attributes that are common to all men and 
distinguish them from other kinds of beings. “Lord, 
what is man that thou art mindful of him: and the son 
of man that thou visitest him’”’ needs no comment. Nor 
is there anything strange in passages where an individual 
is spoken of or to as a “son of man.” In Ezekiel’s vi- 
sions, which our Lord doubtless had in mind, the Creator 
constantly addresses His human creature, the prophet, 
as “‘son of man.’ But to designate one individual as in 
a special sense “the Son of Man”’ is startling and arresting. 

In a famous chapter of Daniel “one that was ancient 
of days” takes his judgment seat (apparently on the 
earth), and “one like unto a son of man”’ comes before — 
him “with the clouds of heaven.’ This human figure 
contrasts with a succession of animal forms that have 
previously appeared on the scene and from the last of 
which strange horns grow. The animals are a succession 
of mighty empires; the horns the successor kingdoms of 
Alexander’s empire. The human figure is plainly said 
to be “the people of the Lord’s saints,” that is, the Jews. 
After the overthrow of the last of the preceding mighty 
and beastly powers, there is given to this human (more 
reasonable or more helpless) being “an everlasting do- 
minion which shall not pass away.” It would be quite 
in keeping with Jewish thought if later readers often read 
into this chapter, in which the writer himself was per- 
sonifying his people, a prophecy of a great leader who 





OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 25¢ 


should arise to represent that people. The figure might 
easily have been linked in some men’s thought with that 
of the Messiah. It appears that in Christian times Jewish 
commentators identified the two. And the phrase, “the 
Son of Man,” might easily so have been used as to suggest 
at once the imagery of Daniel. 

Several of our Lord’s sayings about the Son of Man 
were likely to have aroused such associations. “Two 
quoted so much of the very words of Daniel that the 
allusion was unmistakable. One of these is the saying in 
Mark xiii (to four disciples in private, shortly before His 
death), to which I have already briefly referred. The 
other was momentous. It was a part of that answer to 
the high priest at His trial, which was the only answer He 
gave and which turned the scales of judgment against 
Hime Hereafter ye shall’see the Son of Man” (this/is 
not exactly in the words of Daniel but the remainder is) 
“coming with the clouds of heaven.” ‘This unmistakable 
quotation amounted to an outright declaration that the 
whole promised glory of Israel was to be fulfilled in Him. 
It implied clearly that He was the unique chief and 
representative personage of ‘‘the people of the Lord’s 
saints,’ and that His was to be “an everlasting dominion 
that shall not pass away.” 

As I have said, words of His to disciples and perhaps 
to others led the way to His ultimately using thus the 
words, “Son of Man.” Yet it does not appear that when 
He first called Himself by that name He was alluding to 
the prophecy in Daniel; He certainly cannot have been 
alluding to it alone, and we lose the sense of the phrase 
if we suppose that He was doing so. For neither Daniel 
nor, so far as we know, anyone else! had ever used the 


1This must be qualified if the composition known as the “Similitudes of Enoch” 
was known in quite its present shapein our Lord’s time. The “Similitudes” survive 
as part of the Book of Enoch, which was a medley of divers queer apocalyptic writings, 


256 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


words “the Son of Man” as the designation of a particu- 
lar individual, and it would have been impossible, if this 
_had been the received way of alluding to a great future 
leader of Israel, that our Lord should use it freely of - 
Himself when He was carefully avoiding letting Him- 
self be called the Messiah. On the other hand, “‘ son of 


99 


man” as about equivalent to our “human being” was 
an established idiom ; and our Lord’s hearers were famil- 
iar with the use of it inthe Psalms as meaning mankind, 
probably also with Ezekiel’s use of it as a term of 
great humility. It was not the thought of some tre- 
mendous potentate that He can have meant to arouse or 
can have aroused, nor even the thought of anyone neces- 
sarily a Jew, when He said the Son of Man was “come 
eating and drinking,” and again that He “had not where 
to lay his head.’ He was labeling himself as common 
man or, if in any respect uncommon, then as one “whose 


ranging in date, we are told, from before the Maccabees to after our Lord. The whole 
has been well translated by Archdeacon Charles. The Similitudes are ascribed as a 
whole to the first century B.c., but there is a question whether the passages now in 
question were not inserted in Christian times. The first of them describes, in language 
obviously suggested by Daniel, how before the world was created there was brought 
before God a being whose “countenance had the appearance of a son of man.” This 
figure undoubtedly represents the people of Israel, whose destiny is in God’s contem- 
plation before the creation. Through his mouth God’s judgments are uttered in a dreary 
succession of scenes of divine vengeance upon the Gentiles. A few Gentiles are saved, 
but it interests the writer more that many Jews aredamned. This being, when once 
introduced, is referred to again as “that son of man,” “the son of man who hath 
righteousness,” and so on. In one sentence he is simply “the son of man,” being in 
this heavenly scene the only man present in the company of ‘“cherubim, seraphim, 
and orphannim,” like “the man” among the animals in the garden, in Genesis ii. I 
think it too much to infer from this, as some writers do, that “the Son of Man” wasa 
personage generally recognized among pious Jews before our Lord came, as existing 
in heaven from all eternity, and to infer further that St. Paul arrived at the idea of 
our Lord’s existence before His incarnation merely from the “Similitudes.” St. Paul 
is fond of quoting authorities but never quotes works of this class. The only sign of 
acquaintance with the “Book of Enoch” which we meet in the New Testament is 
an apparent reference in St. Jude to another portion of the book. The whole rub- 
bishy collection is unlikely to have made much impression on so highly literate a man 
as Paul in any age. This Son of Man, it may be added, is supremely unlike the 
Redeemer; he never sets foot on earth. He is an otiose, inactive figure, who 
exhibits only one definite quality, namely, mercilessness. 





OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 257 


visage was so marred more than any man, and his form 
more than the sons of men.” 

The prose dissection of poetry is tedious; here it sim- | 
ply leads to this — that all the poetry which ordinary 
readers have seen in Jesus’ own name for Himself is 
really there. 

Thus, when He used this name at the end, He was 
taking to Himself what to all who heard Him was a posi- 
tion of immeasurable dignity. And, as has been said, 
He had already spoken to the disciples awful words about 
the future coming or comings of Himself as Son of Man. 
He had, it seems, spoken too of that Son of Man who 
‘‘hath power on earth to forgive sins,”’ as if all men would 
thereafter be judged by Him. The real meaning of His 
words about coming again is hard to understand, nor is 
His language about judgment at all easy. These are 
subjects worth much study,’ but they are beside my 
present purpose. It is, however, well to insist that this 
name must still, stupendous as were the attributes which 
He led His disciples to attach to it, have retained that 
tender significance which it had at the first. For the 
disciples some link of association must still mysteriously 
have joined the thought of this great judge and disposer 
of events with the thought of that common human na- 
ture which He shared forever with the weakest of human- 
kind. 

Messiah (Anointed as King) seems, then, to have been 
the common and recognized name by which the Apostles 
could declare our Lord’s claim to the allegiance of the 
Jewish people; and it seems that, while He kept that 
name in the background, they were being subtly led, by 


1 As to our Lord’s future coming or comings, the most interesting and to me satis- 
factory piece of exposition is that of Bishop Gore in his commentary on I John u, 18 
to 29, in his book, The Epistles of Saint John (may I say, a great little book which 
everybody might read with advantage). 


258 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


His uses of this other name, to some conception of a 
greatness belonging to Him, greater than that conveyed 
by the title of “Anointed King.”’ We may take it 
from scholars that to Jewish ears the title, “Son of God,” 
which it puzzles us to find so seldom in the Gospels, 
would have sounded at first neither so great nor so 
mysterious as it does to us. It might, if used simply and 
by itself as our Lord’s chief designation, have seemed 
little more than a complimentary phrase, meaning 
“favored by God.”’? 

The fact that this does not appear to have been a name 
which our Lord brought into the disciples’ use does not 
in any sense do away with the force of His speaking of 
“the Father’? and of “my Father”’ in the way in which 
He did speak. Still less ought it to blind us to the broad 
fact —a plain fact, as it seems to me — that what the 
disciples were taught to feel toward God, as also their 
Father, came to them indissolubly linked with that utter 
and most confident allegiance which they were bearing 
toward the Son. It may be worth while to add that, 
were there no titles of our Lord in these Gospels at all, | 
His consciousness of incomparable authority would be 
almost as plainly on record. ‘There is but one remark- 
able saying (Mark xiii, 32) which can be said to limit His 
authority; it is not, so to say, within the scope of His 
commission, not in accord with the will of the Father 
which He came on earth to do, that He should lift the veil 
of futurity. And more, that veil exists for Him as for 
mankind. 

Of course this view invites much speculation, besides 
conveying a very weighty moral. Here it is perhaps © 
enough to notice that this, the only sentence which re- 


1Or “ adopted by God,” given the status of a son rather than, as before, a slave. 
Cf. (preferably in the Greek) Romans vii, 15 and Galatians iv, 5-7. 





OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 259 


stricts His range, isone that yet reveals in an amazing 
manner His thought of Himself as the Son of God. His 
consciousness of His authority is plain in all His references 
to those who came before Him. It is the equally plain 
implication of a number of parables. It lurks in many a 
sentence where we are not expecting it ; who, for instance, 
is this who thinks it needful to explain that He is “not 
come to destroy the law and the prophets’? The use 
which He made both of the title which He chose for Him- 
self in life and of the title by which He must later be known 
was as subtle as it was powerful. It was but one element 
in that blended whole, the teaching of the spirit of the 
Kingdom which at the outset He proclaimed. 

There are but two more passages on which I would say 
a word: “Come unto me, all ye that labor’”— words of 
which the whole implication is present elsewhere in these 
Gospels, and which can scarcely be conceived to have 
been composed by some untruthful genius in the early 
Church. It is needless to add to what has often been 
said of the measureless scope of the power implied in this 
promise, or as we might say, the unbounded pride of 
this claim. Yet He who here undertakes to give rest to 
“all... that labor and are heavy laden”’ declares in 
the same breath that He is “meek and lowly of heart.” 
Such words anywhere else would strike us simply as in- 
sane. But here they proceed from one whose teaching 
upon the whole has struck most readers by nothing more 
than its surpassing sanity. And for the ordinary reader 
of the Gospels the sense of Jesus’ majesty and force has 
been at one with the sense that indeed He was meek and 
lowly of heart. It is a part of the same paradox by which 
with us the words, ‘‘Son of God” and “Son of Man,” 
have come to count as synonymous. The history of 
Christian dogma begins with the fact that the Apostles 


260 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


had lived in the presence of this paradox before even so 
much as its full strangeness had become clear to them. 

I only refer here to the bread that was broken and the 
wine which was poured at the Last Supper because, be- 
fore I draw a conclusion from this survey, I would wish 
the reader to have in mind all the principal doings and 
sayings of our Lord in these Gospels which relate to the 
birth of Christian doctrine; and of these the Last Supper 
is all but the chief. How were those who supped with 
Him to partake in the very substance of His life? What 
was the “covenant”? It is enough for our purpose at 
the moment that these are questions which we are forced 
to ask. Nor, lastly, can I even seem to have forgotten, 
in all that has been said, that His life was crowned by 
His death. His disciples had to see and the Gospels 
compel us to see that life and that death as parts of the 
same great act. 

The result of this long survey can be summed up with- 
out very many words. 

Our Lord is consistently set before us in these Gospels 
as conscious of an authority which is beyond any com- 
parison that we can make. Except that He shares in 
human inability to see very far into the future, we can 
find no suggestion of any limit to His powers. He is full 
of this sense of authority because He is conscious of a 
near relation to God which belongs to Him alone, and to 
which, equally, no limit can be named; conscious, too, 
not simply that He is man, but that in some way He 
is the type of humanity — the full heir, as it seems to be 
suggested to us, of all its needs, duties, aspirations, joys, 
agonies, and efforts, who at the dawning of manhood’s 
powers is “tempted of the devil,’ and from whom his 
final prayer, ‘‘not my will but thine be done,”’ comes with 
‘‘agony and bloody sweat.” If it is at all difficult to see — 





OUR LORD IN THE EARLIER GOSPELS 261 


quickly that these Gospels imply throughout no less than 
this, it is so only for one reason. Our Lord’s first appeal 
and His appeal to all men was what we might call simply 
ethical; He came to reveal to His own people and to 
each man or woman with whom He dealt the secret of 
God’s sovereignty, that is, how they might live in accord- 
ance with God’s will. All that He has to say about Him- 
self is in a sense incidental to this mission; nor to the 
last, though He says much which goes beyond what is 
commonly called morality, is this ever presented as if it 
could have value or interest apart from its bearing on 
the lives of men or the life of His people. None the less, 
our conception of His moral teaching loses its coherence 
and its force if divorced from that new sense of the rela- 
tion between God and man which Jesus strove to give 
to men; and this relation between God and men He did 
in fact reveal (if we believe it to exist) through the im- 
pression which He created of that relation to both in 
which He stood alone. And lastly, all this teaching is 
brought before us inwrought in the. life that He lived 
and the death that He died. 

If now we think of the men who had been with Him 
in His trials, and who, when He had gone, stood ready 
to carry forward His work in the conviction that He was 
“alive for evermore,” two things will be plain to us. 
Doctrine so learned could not forthwith have ranged 
itself in their minds in complete and ordered form, ready 
for its final exposition. But they had known Jesus, 
living with Him, loving Him and receiving His love, in 
an intercourse richer and more intimate than could find 
full expression in writings of the precise character of the 
Synoptic Gospels. 


XV 


THE DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF DURING THE 
TIME OF THE APOSTLES 


I nave had to deal, at considerable length, with some 
matters which I am forced to conclude are not so impor- 
tant as has sometimes been thought. I may hope to 
treat this concluding and very important part of the 
discussion with at least comparative brevity, for the 
evidence is all in my readers’ hands, and I have only to 
direct their attention to a few points by no means strange 
to them. . 

May I first sum up the course of the argument so far? 

We have seen strong reason for supposing that the Gos- 
pel according to St. John is of great historical impor- 
tance, and that, though with a certain bias, it gives us 
— more particularly in the scene of the Last Supper — 
a true presentation of our Lord. But the difficulty was 
that the doctrine concerning Him, put — more particu- 
larly in that scene — into His own mouth, is often thought 
to have arisen only after His death, under influences 
foreign to His teaching, and to have been chiefly if not 
entirely due to Gentile influences that can be traced es- 
pecially in the teaching of St. Paul. We have examined 
some features of that Jewish religion from which Chris- 
tianity first arose, and have seen the great continuity 
which exists between Judaism and Christianity (a con- 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 263 


tinuity of which, by the way, one very notable sign is 
the fact that the Old Testament became at once the 
authoritative Scripture of Gentile converts to Christ), 
and have seen that St. Paul especially claimed to be the 
heir of strict Jewish tradition. We have considered the 
Gentile influences which are in question, and have had 
regard from this point of view to the evidence afforded 
by St. Paul’s Epistles and by the Acts as to the course of 
development of Christian doctrine; and it appeared that 
the influence exercised upon Christianity by its Gentile 
environment had not been such as affected in any impor- 
tant respect its vital or fundamental ideas, but had been 
such as would hasten and help the clearer formulation of 
Christian thought, and supply that thought with a richer 
store of language in which it could express itself. Lastly, 
we have just now seen what the first three Gospels show 
us about the bearing of our Lord’s own teaching upon 
the doctrine in question. 

Let us now recall the doctrinal teaching of the Fourth 
Gospel and of the Epistles of John. Jesus is here the Son 
of God; He and His Father are one; God is love; this 
has been made manifest by the life and death of Jesus 
Christ ; the whole law of life for man is to be found in 
that loving fellowship with Him and with our brethren 
which acceptance of these tidings makes possible. What 
appears to have been the extent of the change which has 
here come over that theology or Christology of the earlier 
Gospels which we were considering in the last chapter! 
Simply this: In the earlier Gospels we have a record, 
brief but with much living detail, of our Lord’s general 
ministry and of the Apostles’ experience of their life in 
His company. A certain belief about Him resulted from 
it all; it pervades the record, and attentive reading will 
find it, but it does not emerge in succinct and pointed 


2.64. ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


form, to arrest the attention and fire the imagination of 
ignorant and indifferent people. In the Gospel according 
to St. John, and in St. John’s Epistles yet more, we find 


that, for one of the Apostles who had gone through that 


experience, as he looked back years later, his belief can 
concentrate itself in a few pregnant and challenging sen- 
tences, such as a preacher could use ever after. So far 
as substantial doctrine is concerned, it requires a great 
exercise of theological pedantry to find any other differ- 
ence than this. 

But may not the earlier Gospels have been edited and 
doctored so as to express the like doctrine with St. John? 
We do not know all about the channels along which the 
materials of their record have come through to us, but 
we see plainly what sort of materials they originally were, 
and we can see how two of the editors, St. Luke and the 
author of the first Gospel, each with his own peculiarity, 
worked upon these. ‘They included staple teaching of our 
Lord’s, cast in a form meant to be remembered and actu- 
ally very hard to forget ; they include incidents and con- 
versations of an equally unforgettable kind. All this 
is worked into the course of a brief, vivid, fragmentary 
story which illustrates how our Lord’s ministry led the 
Apostles on to that determining crisis in their lives when 
they recognize Him as the Christ, and which gives there- 
after the most salient memories of the closing scenes of His 
life. Ifsuch materials had been touched up by successive 
editors so as to make the whole give a false impression, 
the falsifying hand would have left its clear traces, not 
only by the apparent introduction of an explanatory 
gloss of an unimportant kind here and there but — as is 
the case in certain books of the Old Testament — by 
creating over and over again a repugnancy of a vital kind 
between some one passage in the Gospels and some other. 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 265 


As it is, one subtle, consistent current of thought can be 
seen running through the whole; and, this being so, the 
very fact that this record came from various sources and 
has passed through various hands makes it idle to doubt 
that it truly represents our Lord. 

Through several chapters past we have assumed for 
the sake of argument that the Gospel according to St. 
John is not to be reckoned an historical authority. But, 
in truth, the proof that the Synoptic Gospels are trust- 
worthy as to the matter in question is supported by the 
whole added weight of the evidence that this Gospel is in 
the same matter trustworthy too. 

The matter might be left here, but I have so far spoken 
only incidentally of the direct evidence to be found in 
the New Testament about the actual development which 
the Church and its beliefs did undergo. That evidence 
is largely to be found in the Epistles of St. Paul, of which 
the earliest and the most necessary for our purpose are 
by far the earliest complete books in the New Testament. ° 
If the evidence told a tale which conflicted at all with 
what has so far been said, we should be forced to suspect 
that the Gospels had somehow led us astray. But this 
is very far from being the case, and in what follows I need 
not occupy myself much with the foregoing controversy, 
but may rather think of how the whole story of the New 
Testament should really be read. 

I shall not be tempted to range wide over the whole 
field of those thoughts which necessarily soon began to 
exercise the first Christians. I shall scarcely glance at 
that doctrine of the Holy Spirit which our teachers (may 
I say?) have done but little to make real to us, or at 
the question — now a very practical question — of the 
Church, so diversely interpreted as “‘the blessed company 
of all faithful people” and as (in political language) “the 


266 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


’ 


machine.” I have pursued up to now a single line of 
thought, and so far as that is concerned there are, I think, 
only a few further comments on the New Testament story 
that are necessary. 

Much becomes plain when we once reflect that in the 
New Testament ideas which had at first been addressed 
to Jewish minds, in Jewish terms already in use, are in 
process of translation into terms which are to have a 
meaning for men in any country and in any after time. 
Thus it is: that “the Christ” (or “the Messiah“ :))"a title 
descriptive of an office or position,— the obvious title by 
which, so to speak, to rally Jews to our Lord’s standard, — 
was, according to St. Luke, freely used by St. Peter at 
the first, along with reference to the servant of God fore- 
told in Isaiah lil, and to the ‘‘ prophet like unto” himself 
whom Moses had foretold. But in St. Paul and in the 
Epistles of St. Peter himself there is no longer a title, “the 
Christ,” but as with ourselves, a personal name, “Christ,” 
alternating with “Jesus Christ’ or ‘“‘Christ Jesus.” 
The retention of the word with an altered meaning is a 
sign of St. Paul’s strong sense at once of continuity with 
old Judaism and of great advance upon it. At the same 
time the phrase, “Son of God,” comes into use. He who 
could speak of God as His Father in a special sense was 
not for a while spoken of by those who believed in Him 
as (in a corresponding sense) the Son of God; there was 
special reason for insisting first that He was the Messiah, 
and “Son of God” might have passed as mere language 
of praise, not asserting any peculiar relation to God. 
Used among people who belonged to the Hellenistic 
world, the words “Son of God’’ would have been more 
arresting and were likely to convey a more definite mean- 
ing; they would not necessarily have suggested to a 
Greek, any more than to a Jew, that literal paternity was 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 267 


meant, for the classical myths with which we are familiar 
had little hold on people’s minds; but they were bound 
to suggest the close resemblance which may exist between 
father and son,’ the partaking of the son in his father’s 
nature. Thus we read in Hebrews that our Lord was 
“the express image”’ of the Father’s “‘person.”’ There is 
necessarily a slight uncertainty about any explanation 
of how such a transition came about. But the sort of 
consideration to which I have just called attention is 
enough to dispel the idea that the change in terminology 
about our Lord has anything suspicious about it. 

Further, let us recall that the Apostles themselves had 
known our Lord very well, in the fullest sense of personal 
acquaintance. They continued long with the recollec- 
tion of that acquaintance fresh, and with the impressions, 
tragic beyond words and full beyond words of joy and 
glory, of how their days with Him had ended. It is 
from this fact of their personal intercourse with Him, 
their personal love and personal parting, that the whole 
history of Christian belief starts. Now, we do not 
analyze or classify or put into categories those whom 
we thus know or knew recently; nor do we pause to 
measure up exactly events of great sorrow or delight. 
When He and the disciples parted (let us, if we wish, 
assume that what they thought real was not real), the 
thought that He whom they had seen crucified still lived 
could not possibly have left room for the vaguer and 
vaster thought that His being must be such as involved 
His having existed from eternity. One definite thought 
was enough for the purpose of what they must say to all 

1 For example, in Plato, Rep., 506 E and 508 B and C, ‘‘Offspring of’’ means almost 
the same as “most like to”; and (to paraphrase a little disrespectfully) “the Good 
begat the sun for me to make use of in this analogy.” The Hellenistic thinking world 


had very little notion of what Plato was about, but it used his language all the more 
freely. 


268 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Jerusalem: He was indeed the long-looked-for Messiah, 
the heir of David, the coming One whom under various 
names Moses and the prophets had foretold. To the 


person whom they thus described they gave without any | 


limitation, as they had given while He was with them, 
all the trust and all the allegiance possible. He was to 
them “the captain of life,’’ a conception to which, pro- 
vided it was entertained fully and in earnest, nothing 
could really be added. 

But to these serious men the time was bound to come 
when they would, so to speak, stand back a little in 
thought from the personal image that was so living to 
them, asking themselves more explicitly what He meant 
to them, asking themselves, too, what His death meant. 
Why did He die? They had to preach Him and explain 
Him to men who had never seen and had heard little 
of Him. What was He to mean for strangers as well as 
for themselves? And then there came into action the 
minds of new believers, men who had never known Him 
at all or at the utmost had only had a vision of Him. 
These men must in a way define Him adequately to them- 
selves. Peter could think of Jesus as of one that he had 
known. Paul, with no less intensity of emotion, must 
form that distinctly intellectual conception which he had 
the intellectual power to form. 

We must soon return to the plain enough results of 
this, but we have struck here upon the great preliminary 
difficulty which for many of us involves the whole his- 
tory in perplexity. To me, at any rate, it was a standing 
puzzle, from childhood, that our Lord’s actual disciples 
were content for several years to preach to Jews alone — 
nay, that Jesus Himself confined His mission strictly to 
Jews, and Christianity took the mighty stride which made 
us Christians chiefly at the compulsion of a masterful 


: 
; 
E 
} 
4 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 269 


man who had never been a disciple of Jesus. After all, 
however passionately Paul may declare the contrary, did 
he not make a new religion which was not the religion 
of Jesus, since in this vital respect its spirit seems so dif- 
ferent? Destructive criticism of the New Testament 
owes its plausibility not to its peddling points about the 
terms and even the metaphors of doctrine, nor to its 
childlike surprise when some Syrian inscription or Egyp- 
tian papyrus reveals that men of different races and creeds 
have had thoughts in common, but to this, which is a 
real puzzle to ordinary readers. Yet our difficulty is an 
illusion, which disappears the moment that we realize 
what was the work which the Apostles were doing in 
those early years, how it was related to what was to 
follow, how it was related to what we must conceive was 
the purpose of our Lord. 

The expansion of Christianity into a religion for all 
nations meant to Paul, and meant to Peter too, the calling 
of men “from the ends of the earth” into a community, 
the Israel of God, which after centuries of discipline and 
preparation had been purified, transfigured, and raised to 
a higher power by the coming of the Christ and by its 
acceptance of Him. A large part of the actual Jewish 
community which had endured that discipline so long 
did not in fact accept Him, but, as our Lord had foretold 
in parables, were themselves cast out, while other men 
were coming to take their place with Abraham, Isaac, 
and Jacob. It was a tragic fact to Paul when he was 
“turning to the Gentiles’; the Epistle to the Romans 
rings with the tragedy. It had a glorious side, with 
which the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians ring, 
in that Christ had “broken down the middle wall of par- 
tition”? (the barrier, for crossing which a Gentile was 
punishable with death, that separated the inner court of 


270 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


the Temple from the outer), and from the point of view 
of Christian men abolished all those other differences 
between races and classes of men which from any other 
point of view seem fundamental. It was a fact which ~ 
the fourth Evangelist looked back upon with indignation 
against the rejected men who had themselves rejected 
Christ, and with the fiery patriotism of the old Israel 
wholly transferred to the new. By Peter and his com- 
rades in the early days such an expansion of Christianity 
had not yet been contemplated as likely; but in the Acts 
a clearer consciousness of their actual position in the 
drama of history is imputed to them. Peter declares: 
“Ye are the children of the prophets, and of the cove- 
nant which God made with our fathers, saying unto 
Abraham, And in thy seed shall all the kindreds of the 
earth be blessed. Unto you first God, having raised up 
his servant,’ sent him to bless you, in turning away every 
one of you from his iniquities.”’ 

Toward this great transformation of a religion (in the 
first instance) for Jews into one chiefly (as it turned out) 
attracting Gentiles, the point of view of St. Peter before 
the event, of St. Paul while the chief agent in it, and of 
St. John or his follower looking back upon it, is funda- 
mentally the same. 

The stages of progress marked in the Acts are very 
natural. Peter and his colleagues had at first no idea of 
any breach with the law and the worship of their fathers. 
Stephen was appointed to see to needs arising out of the 
presence in Jerusalem of people who had lived outside 
Palestine, and was, presumably, himself one of them; 
at any rate, he looked at Jerusalem in relation to the 


1 There can be little doubt that “servant,” not “son,” is the right translation, or 


that the reference is to God’s servant in Isaiah liii, where, in the Septuagint, the same 
word is used. 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 271 


world, and his talk seemed to the Jews to be full of men- 
ace. Stephen declared that neither the temple worship 
nor anything equally local was of the essence of that 
religious tradition which started with Abraham in Meso- 
potamia, and from him came down through Moses in 
Egypt and a succession of prophets — with the bulk of 
the people who were privileged to listen to Moses and 
those prophets kicking at that religion all the time. 
Paul, who had been prominent among those whom 
Stephen offended, was after his conversion only gradually 
led to appeal to Gentiles by his experiences as a missionary 
in Jewish colonies abroad. Meanwhile, the Christians 
in Jerusalem, hearing that Peter had preached to some 
Gentiles, “glorified God.’ There seems to have been a 
natural expectation that some day “the Gentiles shall 
come to thy light,”’ before it began to appear that it was 
anybody’s special business to fetch them. The one stage 
passed into the other gradually; converts were welcome, 
as proselytes to Judaism had been welcome. 

No trouble, no sense of violent transition arose till the 
fact broke upon the Church that multitudes were accept- 
ing the Christ, the Jewish Messiah, who could not possi- 
bly be expected to accept circumcision or almost any 
other ceremonial requirement of that law of Moses which, 
for the first Christians, had been the very “‘schoolmaster 
to bring [them] to Christ.”’ It was not till this crisis had 
come, with its urgent demand for the thinking-out of © 
principles, that the question what the mission of our Lord, 
His death, His very being, really meant, could have been 
fully faced by any man, or even recognized as of equal 
importance with a question about provision for widows. 

If this preliminary stage (which has seemed so unaccount- 
able) had never been, is it too much to say that Chris- 
tianity must by now have been extinct or else worthless ? 


272 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


We can conceive that a cult of Jesus Christ, with some 
interesting doctrine about Him, might have spread far 
in the world of Greece and Rome — a cult a good deal 
purer than that of Attis and a good deal less exacting | 
than that of Mithras. What did spread was a way of 
life, which had been quietly practised till its spirit had 
grown very deep into the characters of many men and 
women, the life of a community which, at least in its per- 
secuted prime, was held together by an intenser mutual 
loyalty than that of any other fellow citizens. This new 
sense of brotherhood and the spirit of the simplest pre- 
cepts of Jesus Christ had to be learned in an unambitious 
way by the Church before Christianity would be worth 
spreading. 

Nor must we forget that the Christian Church had to 
start as a Church of true Jews, steeped in what had seemed 
to the prophets the one true principle of Judaism. ‘That 
principle was one which made morality and religion the 
same; God was a God of righteousness. This and the 
truth that He was one and not many were, as we like St. 
Paul can see, really inseparable thoughts. By a long, 
hard, forging process the minds of many Jews had been 
made firm in this belief, when Jesus came and to some of 
these Jews gave a new meaning to the law which they 
struggled to obey, and a new power of fulfilling it. Now 
we cannot too much emphasize the fact that in the Gentile 
world neither the full righteousness of God nor His one- 
ness was a recognized part of any widely preached or 
generally acknowledged religion; the latter, indeed, was 
a principle which the men who held it most firmly for 
themselves might have hesitated the most to proclaim in 
a manner which would have disturbed seriously the poly- 
theistic beliefs of common people. In that age the name 
of Jesus Christ might have been spread abroad in such a 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 273 


way that for common people He would have taken rank 
among gods and demigods in a commodious Pantheon, 
while some refined persons wove Him into the nightmare 
schemes in which philosophic minds (when not robustly 
infidel) took pleasure. This is not a fancy. Even at so 
early a date as St. Paul’s later Epistles, and much more 
in the next few generations, we can see that the Church 
had a fringe to it in which this was happening. It may 
not sound shocking to us, but it would certainly have 
meant the loss of that driving power in the direction of 
the highest righteousness which was the unique feature 
of Christianity among the creeds that could appeal to 
ordinary minds. As it was, Christianity entered into 
the Hellenistic and into the Roman world resolutely 
demanding of common people that they should forsake 
their idols to serve the living God, Who inexorably de- 
manded righteousness, and Who was One. The history 
of the prophets, which must sometimes strike us as an 
age-long repetition of aspiration, delusion, and failure, 
had really resulted in a Judaism which stood alone in the 
world, demanding this of its own people. It is certain 
that Christianity, as we understand it and as Jesus meant 
it to be if He meant anything, could never have gone 
further if there had not first been formed a compact and 
devoted body of men who accepted the Christ while 
they remained (and because they remained) Jews through 
and through. This is what was accomplished in the years 
before Paul and Barnabas began the great move forward. 
Incidentally we can now understand why St. Paul and 
the puzzled and hesitating man with whom for a while 
he had difficulties were in the memory of the next genera- 
tion inseparably associated as the two great Apostles, as 
if their work were one. 

And now, was their joint work in accordance with the 


274. ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


design of Jesus of Nazareth? We are to ask that ques- 
tion here without any doctrinal prepossession. Apart 
from any Christian belief in Him, we shall, I think, have 
to ask ourselves whether He was one of those excellent 
and interesting historical personages about whom it is 
an affectation to get excited now, or whether He was very 
great indeed; and it is impossible to study the Gospels 
at all closely without at least inclining to the latter alter- 
native. At any rate, He was not one of those men who 
have taken pains to light fires without its occurring to 
them that they would spread. When He set Himself to 
work to make a great change in Judaism; when He made 
men see the whole sum of the law in the spirit of actively 
doing good; when He taught them to love and imitate a 
Father who was perfect in kindness, and unheeded by 
whom not one sparrow fell; when He set the brand of 
His scorn upon the question, ““Who is my neighbor,” He 
was aware that the new Jerusalem which He was creating 
would no longer be merely Jerusalem. The prophets to 
whom He appealed had looked forward to the day when 
a purified Israel should give a light gladly accepted by 
the nations round. The popular idea of the “kingdom,”’ 
which He seized upon, involved either the conversion of 
the Gentiles or their enslavement. Unless He was stupid, 
He must have thought of the Gentiles, and unless He 
was bad, He must have cared about Ahern That He con- 
pernniaree their conversion is thus certain. 

We must go a step further: When He said, “I am not 
sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel”’ and 
acted strictly upon that principle as we are told He did, 
He deliberately, with a great design in view, took the only 
course by which in fact other lost sheep could have been 
gathered into His fold. In this cardinal respect Paul 
was, as he claimed, an Apostle of Christ and nothing else. 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 27s 


To return to the growth of thought and beliefs: People 
who study the New Testament with a wish to learn from 
it may easily find there a real development that meant 
the fuller understanding of what the salient facts and the 
simple teaching present in the Gospels did enfold. They 
may find also that different Christian writers, looking at 
the whole matter from different points of view and with 
different powers of vision, each imperfect, did write very 
different books, but were all the same, as they passion- 
ately felt themselves to be, in the presence of the same 
truth. 

It has often been noticed about St. Paul that he refers 
very little to express teaching of our Lord’s. In letters 
written with intense concentration upon their particular 
purpose this is perhaps not so remarkable as the won- 
derful expositions which those letters do contain of the 
whole spirit of our Lord’s teaching. Yet I think perhaps 
Paul would rather not have fastened his readers’ attention 
very closely upon the letter of any precepts, even our 
Lord’s. He had escaped from the bondage of the law. 
In any case we must remark in his Epistles the insistence 
with which he recurs to the thought of the Cross. If we 
may judge from the early chapters of the Acts and from 
St. John, the attention of men who had been our Lord’s 
actual companions, “beginning from the baptism of John 
unto the day that he was received up”’ from them, was 
not so much concentrated upon that single point. 
“Unto the Jews,” St. Paul says, the Cross was ‘‘a stum- 
blingblock.” It might well be a stumblingblock that the 
anointed heir of David’s glory should die as a felon; and 
we may take it that it had been so to St. Paul. May we 
not clearly gather one thing about that revulsion of ideas 
which suddenly came upon him? ‘To all his after thought 
the glory not of David but of God stood revealed in that 


276 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


death. For every Christian now this central thought of 
Paul’s is present in the short story which — perhaps 
largely from St. Peter’s lips — St. Mark set down. 

One chief element in that thought is equally con-. 
spicuous in the earliest teaching attributed to St. Peter, 
in his own Epistle long after, in St. Paul, in the Epistle 
to the Hebrews, in St. John’s Epistles and in the Gospel 
which fairly bears his name — conspicuous in slightly 
varying forms which need hide from no one the identity 
of the root idea. Jesus Christ had brought “remission 
of sins.”’ One fact here needs to be noted by modern 
readers. In the various phrases used in the Epistles and 
the Acts in this connection the idea of letting men off a 
punishment which might justly have been inflicted is 
seldom if ever prominent; perhaps indeed it is never 
very distinctly present except in the Epistle to the 
Hebrews, where the argument is that the sacrificial sys- 
tem of the Jews has served its purpose and can go. Toan 
extent which it may be worth anyone’s while to seek out 
for himself, the point of these passages is that the burden 
of the sins themselves is taken away. The horror of 
inability to be righteous as the law required righteous- 
ness, which was so strongly felt by some of the Psalmists 
and had been so strongly felt by St. Paul, is gone. This 
is no less evident in the early speeches in the Acts (an 
equally trustworthy expression of feeling that is not 
exactly Pauline? whether St. Peter spoke them or not) 
than it is in St. Paul: “turning away every one of you 
from his iniquities”’ is the “‘ blessing”? brought by God’s 
servant who, according to the prophet referred to, 
had been “smitten for our iniquities.”” Repentance and 

1Tt is often said that the writer of the Acts shows no great understanding of St. 
Paul’s ideas. This is not in the least incompatible with the friendship and mutual 


appreciation of the two men, and it is mere ignorance of human nature to argue as if _ 
it were. 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 277 


remission of sins are a single transaction. If we ask how 
these men related in their minds what to modern thought, 
with its abstracting tendency, seem two transactions, we 
may read again the parable of the Prodigal Son, and think 
whether, on the actual return home of that character, — 
if he had anything in him,— his single, all-absorbing 
thought would not have been the ending of an appalling 
loneliness and estrangement, to which any material gains 
would have been merely incidental. 

If we further ask just how Jesus Christ effected the 
ending of that estrangement between God and man, we 
might open up a field of speculation, largely useful, which 
neither our own minds nor those of the Apostles could 
quite adequately explore. It was not simply by teaching 
that He did it. St. Paul’s main thought is fairly clear 
tous. The impossible task of living unerringly by a mul- 
titude of exacting rules is not what God can any longer 
be thought to lay on us, certain though it is, to Paul and 
to us, that rules have had their use. He asks for lives 
increasingly governed by that trust in Him and love of 
Him (love that would gladly share any sacrifice of self) 
which the revelation of Him in His Son makes no less 
possible to us than is any natural affection. St. Paul 
wrestles in argument to make plain this feeling which is 
burning in him. In the earlier utterances of the Acts it 
is implicit. It runs through the writings of St. John as 
something familiar from the first. It is easy for us to 
grasp, in a way, how faith in Christ is felt to “justify” 
men ;! we shall however miss a vital part of what all 
these writers mean if we overlook their intense convic- 


1 There are few better bits of exposition of Romans than that which may be found 
in Matthew Arnold’s Saint Paul and Protestantism, dealing with this subject. T. H. 
Green’s lay sermon on “ Faith,” (and also the preceding one on “The Witness of God,’”) 
reprinted in Vol. III of his works, is a memorable utterance on the subject. It will 
be remembered that neither of these authorities can possibly be classed as “ orthodox,” 


278 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


tion, however we interpret it, that the saving force is 
the gift of God in Christ, which man may accept and 
go on accepting. We may or may not be able to inter- 
pret their language fully to ourselves; what we can easily - 
discover is that the central thoughts, which become fuller 
and more explicit in the development which we witness, 
retain their substantial identity from first to last. 

Many appreciably different ways of looking at the same 
matter can be found among the writers of the New Tes- 
tament. The single source from which they all draw 
inspiration becomes, I believe, unmistakable upon careful 
reading. I will compare but two. No books could, in a 
way, differ more than the Epistle of St. John and that of 
St. James (not John’s brother James). In St. John all 
moral teaching is concentrated into passionate insistence 
on the single thought of love, and this single master- 
principle of life is for him not so much proof of or conse- 
quence of, as one with the doctrine which he reiterates 
(almost with fury), that Jesus is the Son of God. St. 
James is, in an utterly different way, as unmistak- 
ably a Jew as St. John. His morality is on the whole 
the simplest and best morality of the Old Testament 
prophets. He was probably that head of the Church in 
Jerusalem whose special adherents were so troublesome 
to St. Paul, but who himself, when St. Paul was coming 
for the last time to Jerusalem, devised — being a great 
gentleman— a proceeding for St. Paul to take which 
should be entirely agreeable to his own cast of thought 
and which yet might commend him to his bitter antago- 
nists. The beautiful pages of James do not dwell upon 
any central principle of life, and we might be tempted 
to say that they contain no word of doctrine; yet the 
single phrase, “the perfect law of liberty,” contains the 
pith of St. Paul’s teaching about works and faith. There 





EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 279 


are actually only two sentences in which James thinks it 
necessary to mention Jesus Christ by name. The first 
is the opening verse, in which he announces himself as 
the “‘ servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ.”’ The 
second is this: “My brethren, hold not the faith of our 
Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory, with respect of 
persons.” Much has been written most sincerely of late 
by men who are, so to speak, doctrinally minded in the 
highest degree, about the very practical bearing of the 
Incarnation upon social questions. We can see here how 
the same thought possessed a writer who has often been 
taken as the exponent of the extreme opposite tendency 
to the doctrine-making of Paul and of the Johannine 
books. And a little reflection upon this very pregnant 
saying of that writer is as good a way as any to under- 
stand why to St. John an intense belief in what we call 
a dogma has become the driving force of life, and why, 
conversely, love of God or of Jesus or of man seems to 
him to compel that belief. 

This is a sufficient example of those differences of tem- 
perament, and consequently of point of view, with which 
the same idea is presented to us in the New Testament 
by different men. The differences continue to this day, 
and it is curious that they are closely comparable now 
to those which we can see in the beginning. As St. Paul 
said, “there are diversities of gifts but the same Spirit.” 
So too with the growth which we have observed. The 
revolutionary change which some men have fancied they 
could trace is — with that form of outside influence to 
which they have attributed it—a myth. The fact is 
that an idea, present at the beginning, unfolded with 
riper thought. 

It would be superfluous to labor further for the pur- 
pose of indicating the place which the Fourth Gospel takes 


280 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


in the marvelously ordered whole of the New Testament ; 
it might indeed be a little worse than superfluous — it 
might be displeasing; and I venture to say why. It 
could not easily be done without giving to many readers — 
a keener feeling than exposition of other Scripture does, 
that the commentator is handling something which they 
wish he would let alone.t' For there are two ways and 
two ways only in which Chapters xiii to xvii (and of course 
some other passages) of this Gospel can affect a reader. 
He may read them with indifference, or with the inclina- 
tion to suppose them a fabrication, or he may read them 
with the feeling that he is here brought nearer than any- 
where else to the presence of Jesus Christ. That doc- 
trine of His Sonship and of His unity with the Father, 
which has been thought to prove that this scene is unau- 
thentic, may elsewhere be discussed coolly as a doctrine. 
Here, if the thread of the discourse is once observed, it - 
comes to us as a part of the mind of Christ in contempla- 
tion of death. 

To make one last comment which for a moment may 
seem a paradox: It remains to be said that the view of 
His person which is here made part of our Lord’s inmost 
thought — and set forth in what in other ways is a won- 
derfully real scene — happens to be the most rational 
view of the matter which can be traced in early belief, 
or which from the evidence before us we can possibly 
attribute to Him. Certainly He thought Himself and 
was taken by all His followers to be in some fundamental 
respect different from all other men. We can more or less 
reconstruct the sort of conceptions which people at that 
time might form of Him — as the Messiah of Jewish 


1 But I cannot say this without adding that this difficult thing has been done in 
one book which cannot be too widely known or too often read. Hart’s The Way, the 
Truth, and the Life (Macmillan & Co.) is a great classic of religious literature. 


EARLY DEVELOPMENT OF BELIEF 281 


apocalyptic, as a demigod, as an emanation, or what not. 
Any one of these conceptions might, so far as we can see, 
have come to prevail within New Testament times, if it 
had corresponded at all to what His unphilosophic dis- 
ciples really felt to have been His mind. And all of 
those conceptions are absurd from our point of view, 
since we possess some real knowledge with which we feel 
that they conflict, and with a little effort we could explain 
that they do conflict. But if we use words with mean- 
ing, we cannot say that it is absurd to think of Jesus of 
Nazareth as, according to St. John, He did think of Him- 
self. We may say that we do not understand the doc- 
trine; that it conveys no definite meaning to us; that it 
is vastly improbable; or that it does not interest us; but 
we cannot pretend to ourselves that we have any knowl- 
edge about God, or man, or the world, or Jesus, which 
proves it untrue. 

To conclude: I have written this book with a critical 
purpose, and in the process of writing it have — at least 
in my own mind — maintained unremittingly the spirit of 
search; and I confidently state the result as one which 
scientific history should soon come to accept as settled, 
regardless of its effect upon religion. Apart from the 
historical value of the Fourth Gospel in other respects, 
it appears that one section of it in an especial degree was 
the portrayal of the actual Jesus as John knew Him. It 
has presented itself as a difficulty that the doctrine there 
attributed to Jesus was not His but the product of in- 
fluences quite remote from Him. It appears now that 
this cannot be so. Make of it what we may, Jesus Christ 
of Nazareth did think and did speak as according to St. 
John He thought and spoke concerning His Father, 
Himself, His followers, and that Spirit of His which should 
abide with them forever. 


XVI 
EPILOGUE 


I HAVE finished with the proper subject of my book. But, 
as I have studied this problem of mere criticism con- 
fessedly and obviously without having had, when I first 
began, any fixed theological opinions, it would be not 
modest but cowardly if I did not add what occurs to me 
now upon those ulterior questions apart from which criti- 
cism would be a dreary pastime. 

Those questions present one vast, connected problem 
of seemingly endless complexity. No wise man thinks 
any longer that he can offer an intellectual and system- 
atic solution of the problem, complete, certain, and clear. 
It is wise, in the first place, to keep to the uttermost a 
fresh and open mind — open, not in the sense that it will 
not learn what it can learn, but in that it is ready 
to learn more. And further, it is best to be interested 
in the riddle of the world chiefly as it concerns our busi- 
ness for the day. ‘There are indeed some few philosophic 
people to whom the concentrated study of some portion 
of the problem offers an honest life’s work like another. 
“Mais il faut cultiver notre jardin.”” Gradually, in the 
dim or dazzling prospect, the outlines grow clearer at one 
or two points, — not necessarily the same points for dif- 
ferent eyes, — and then at further points. From a very 
early stage we may cease to worry over the thought that 
the whole outline will probably never be quite clear. 





EPILOGUE 283 


I shall without further apology try to say several things 
which I think strongly, confining myself on the whole to 
the things of which I have longest felt certain. 

I start from an observation which happens to have 
forced itself upon me long ago, regardless of such princi- 
ples as I should probably have then professed. Toward 
any great man, alive or dead, except our Lord, the atti- 
tude of discipleship is unreasonable and unmanly ; toward 
our Lord, as from a simple reading of the Gospels we all 
more or less conceive of Him, some sort of unaffected 
discipleship appears, as we go on in life, the only reason- 
able or manly attitude. As to great men generally, sane 
and wholesome hero-worship always grows up (as a nice 
child’s respect and love for parents does) with a pretty 
clear and probably amused perception of their weak- 
nesses, and without much inclination, except in little 
ways or for a little while, to model our lives upon theirs. 
The attempt to work up a cult of some national hero is 
an insult to the memory of a man who, if he was great, 
must have had some foundation of simplicity and humil- 
ity. In the case of our Lord the analogy goes only a 
little way. There can certainly be strained attempts to 
work up an emotional state in regard to Him which will 
at the best be transitory. But there are no less certainly 
many people who have long outgrown the disposition to 
humbug themselves and are quietly at grips with practi- 
cal life, but in whom the set desire to follow Jesus Christ 
has formed itself naturally and half consciously. It may 
become a very distinct desire indeed. Some people, 
though they would shrink from putting the fact into words, 
would have to confess that they never get through their 
ordinary course of duty efficiently except in a temper that 
is kept alive in them by the constantly renewed resolve 
of very humble discipleship to Him. Conversely, they 


284 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


would own that their periods of lowered purpose and 
poor performance follow upon the occasional letting go of 
that resolve. They would say too that in emergencies of 
special difficulty, even the ordinary emergencies of a> 
trivial kind which occur every few weeks and of which 
examples would sound ridiculous, their courage, endur- 
ance, and prompt command of their wits depend upon 
the same cause. In some degree this sense that disciple- 
ship is His due, and that it is worth the while for our- 
selves, comes after a time to everybody who has a habit 
of studying or keeping familiar with the Gospels in a sen- 
sible way — that is, passing lightly over what he does not 
understand, assuming for a reasonable time that what 
repels him is probably not understood, dwelling on what 
he does understand and gradually extending it. Of 
course I am far from saying that every good man is a 
follower of our Lord in this way. Jam not even assuming 
that sincere Christian conviction always takes the form 
which I have described. I am saying that Jesus Christ 
stands before the world as a personality toward whom, 
and toward whom alone, this simple and wholesome dis- 
cipleship is possible. 

But Christianity may be looked at in quite another 
light — not as the personal following of a person, but as 
a principle or spirit of action; to call it a law or a moral 
code would evidently be an inadequate description. Re- 
garding it in this light, we evidently must not judge it 
by any of the religious systems which have plainly been 
perversions of it, or by the standard of the many partial 
Christians who are not much influenced by it. I am here 
speaking of it as it presents itself (with differences among 
themselves on secondary matters) to those of the best 
people whom we know who happen also to be Christians. 
It is of course hard to describe, because it is repugnant 


EPILOGUE 286 


to it to be tied down to a formula. But, clearly, it exalts 
common affections and duties into a love of God and of 
man— of a man’s nearest and dearest more particularly, 
but ultimately of all people in proportion as he is con- 
cerned with them. Clearly, too, this love is sustained 
and is kept wholesome and humble by some sense that it 
is a man’s own poor response to God’s love of him; also 
it evidently forbids concentration of one’s interests on 
one’s self, one’s fortunes, or one’s soul. Above all, it is 
not a mere sentiment, but a driving power. 

Such are some of the evident characteristics of the 
Christian spirit at its best, and one gradually learns that 
every idea of what is right, honorable, splendid, or worth 
while which one can lastingly entertain, no matter from 
what source it may be derived, is, in the very intelligible 
phrase of the Gospel, fulfilled by this Christian spirit. The 
sound and lasting element in any healthy aspiration or 
any ambition worthy of man or woman is seized upon by 
the spirit of Christ — as real Christians conceive it — and 
is strengthened. I say one gradually learns, because, of 
course, it is immensely hard to reconcile one’s self in 
practice to the sacrifice which Christianity inexorably 
demands of mere self-indulgence or mere greed or mere 
malignity, in the case of some of our native desires and 
the creeds and ideals based on them. But we are all 
quite aware, in cold blood, that sacrifice is going one way 
or another to be enforced upon us; and considered in 
cold blood, the bold statement which has just been made 
needs but very little illustration. 

Probably the finest example that could be chosen of a 
high pattern of life that has arisen apart from Christianity 
is that conceived by the greatest Greek philosophers in 
the great age of Greek life. In Plato’s Republic is a 
description of the virtues which the real pursuit of truth 


286 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


will develop in young men brought up to philosophy and 
to arms, the “athletes of the great game.’ Few people 
could read the passage intelligently without being stirred 
by it, or without seeing that the moral qualities here | 
thought possible for a few specially gifted people are the 
natural outcome, in some people of quite ordinary gifts, 
of the simple principles of Christianity, only that in 
Christianity they take markedly a purer and a stronger 
form. Or if we look for great patterns not in any formu- 
lated system but in the tempers which have prevailed for 
a while in some races at some times, we may think for a 
moment of the heroes of Icelandic sagas. There was 
something so splendid in these outrageous gentry that 
we had rather their vices survived than that their virtues 
perished; but they were unlicked cubs; and we can 
easily imagine that all that was really splendid about 
them might be enlisted entire in the service of Christ — 
a thing which has often happened. So it is with what- 
ever deeply stirs our sympathy and whatever carries, by 
contrast with us, an honestly felt rebuke to ourselves in 
the better qualities of any race, period, creed, or school. 
This is not a statement to be hastily taken as proved, 
but it is one which surely comes home after a while, when 
we have once fairly realized what in their essence Chris- 
tian principles are. 

Two further remarks arise out of this. In the first 
place, great perversions of its principles have again and 
again obscured Christianity; it has sunk into submis- 
siveness to false authority, into a grim system of self- 
righteousness, into a welter of morbidly emotional con- 
versationalism, and into childish or dark superstitions 
of the most opposite kinds. Nevertheless, the Chris- 
tianity of which we are here speaking is not some fan- 
ciful ideal. Sober history shows it almost inevitably 


EPILOGUE 287 


submerged by all these things in turn in the course of its 
struggle to dominate the world, and yet keeping its per- 
sistent life and emerging, not without gain, from each 
dark period. Upon a broad view of its past and its pres- 
ent, the thought arises that, far from being a thing which 
has served its turn and will make way for some better 
system, it is very young —the least spent, perhaps the 
least ripened of the great influences now perceptible in 
the world. In the second place, it is hard to see what is 
meant by the Christian preachers who have said of late 
that it contains no final revelation. That in detail Chris- 
tian duties look differently now than they did in the first 
century, that each generation has its own problem to 
face and its own gains to win; that there is always much 
to be learned — all that is obvious enough. But that 
any principle which Christ implanted needs revising, 
any more than the multiplication table, is not an illu- 
minating suggestion. Take the principle expressed by 
St. John in the words, “God is love” (as in the process 
of thought and experience a man comes to understand 
that principle), and regard it not on its inscrutable meta- 
physical side but as a principle which is in some way to 
govern conduct and education. We cannot really see in 
it a mere partial expression of truth, which human wis- 
dom will amplify and outgrow. Honest common-sense 
compels us to think either that it is false — definitely 
misleading, as it has actually been said to be by philoso- 
phies which have had tremendous effect upon the world 
very recently — or that it is the whole truth, and that there 
is nothing more to be said about it ever. If we hold it 
true, we hold it final. And we must also observe that in 
some sense at least it was revealed in Christ. Thoughts 
that fit in with it were abundant enough in prophets, 
sages, and philosophers before Him, but in its plenitude 


288 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


and its nakedness it took nothing less than the whole 
life and death of Christ to make it pass in the world as 
anything but sheer nonsense. 

To sum up what has so far been said: It grows upon - 
many open minds as simple and certain fact, that men 
have had so far but one Master and that He revealed the 
one Gospel they can ever have. 

Meanwhile we all necessarily have thoughts about the 
world which at the outset seem quite apart from religion 
or irreligion, thoughts of the kind which it takes a poet to 
express at all, and a great poet to express in a way that 
satisfies common men and women. In exact prose one 
can only point out that what poets try to express is gener- 
ally something of which common men and women are 
quite conscious as real. All the greater poets have tried 
to express something about the all-embracing and con- 
tinuous life of the world as a whole, a life of the existence 
of which we seem to be conscious, and toward which we 
seem bound to take some mental attitude or other, which 
may have nothing to do with theology. That attitude 
may be said to begin, normally, in a wonder that is pleas- 
ant and rather awful,—not the less pleasant for being 
awful, — and a sort of sympathy with Nature. With 
the growth of full physical strength, a happy con- 
sciousness of our own vitality normally carries with 
it some sort of exultant feeling that the world is a 
glorious place to live in, and the more so because it will 
go on when we do not. Almost from the first there is 
some subdued presence of sadness in it, and with the on- 
set of sorrows which we are old enough to feel and of the 
first real disappointments and disillusionments, the sad- 
ness of man’s and one’s own position in the world prevails 
with many people. Life becomes to them a thing not to 
think about; or it may become hauntingly dreary; or 


EPILOGUE 289 


in the case of people with a literary or artistic tempera- 
ment and nothing to say, a sort of cult of the dismal or 
the dirty may arise. Still the healthy reaction against 
the sadness of life and the terror of the world is that 
which all great tragedy has tried to express — a courage 
which looks at agony and failure very steadily and fully, 
and yet finds the world great, and life glorious, and the 
sorrow in some unaccountable way worth while. It is 
needless here to try to put more adequately the note that 
is sounded to everybody by the poetry or the novels of 
the sterner sort of which he genuinely feels the greatness. 
(In saying this, one should remember that some people 
do not read poetry or great fiction, for the excellent rea- 
son that they do not need it.) But everyone, as years 
go on, makes a more or less definite election whether the 
tragic facts shall make the world seem a dull thing at the 
best, or whether they shall somehow enhance the beauty 
and the grandeur that can be found in it — and enhance, 
it should be added, the sport and the abounding fun. 
The brave choice is always possible, and the oncoming of 
age, which in a way must abate personal enjoyments, 
seems often to add a serenity to the assurance that life 
is great. 

To this paradoxical persuasion, to which normal men 
cling and of which the great tragedians and the great 
humorists are in their various ways the prophets, Chris- 
tianity, as one may come to feel, brings a fresh consist- 
ency and force. Its one paradox, the “foolishness” 
which revealed itself to Paul as the only wisdom, concerns 
a God (the ruler of this awful world in which fate breaks 
the strongest and good is won at the cost of error and 
waste and frightful pain) whose own eternal Being shone 
once and for all, in all its splendor, before human eyes in 
the literal human endurance of sorrow and sacrifice as 


290 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


intense as can ever be the lot of His creatures. Nothing 
could be gained by speaking further of that strange doc- 
trine, of which the consequences are so strangely apparent 
to the stupidest minds that are struck by the symbolism 
of the Cross. 

Yet I would say one word about a further Christian 
doctrine closely associated with this, of which, I think, 
the force is apt to come home to us slowly. It concerns 
the forgiveness of sins. I suppose that the word “sin”’ 
is one of the many of which the sense has become obscured 
with repetition, for quite intelligent people have derided © 
the idea. Yet it would be a mental abnormality to be 
wholly unaware of the fact indicated by the word. No- 
body can be healthily alive without having often tingled 
with impotent rage against himself for something that he 
hasdone. Of course this self-anger is often most unforget- 
table when it relates to some quite trivial awkwardness, 
and a man will almost blush half a century later about 
some boyish absurdity which he knows had its respect- 
able side. Yet it is not true to say that we forgive our- 
selves our graver lapses, our actually foul acts or perhaps 
fouler omissions. These are things of which, the truth 
is, we dare not think; doubtless, though it is good for 
us sometimes to face them steadily, it would not be good 
for us to think of them often. So far as we do think of 
them, they are worse in our eyes than they would be in 
the eyes of our friends or of our enemies either; it is no 
comfort to know that other people do equally despicable 
things; and the excuse of circumstances, temperament, 
and so on, which we would willingly make for other 
people’s faults, would be the worst mortification of our 
self-esteem if we made it for ourselves. 

This is, I am sure, the normal way of thinking for 
healthy minds, and this is not much less so: the appalling 


EPILOGUE 291 


ease with which we may lose this way of thinking in 
regard to the particular kind of fault which has become 
habitual to us. Psychologically there can be no doubt 
that to see our fault quite steadily, judge it duly, con- 
fess to others in those circumstances which make con- 
fession fitting, and yet remain unshaken in courage and 
unmoved by “that impure passion of remorse”’ is the 
way of health and sanity. It is usually very hard; yet, 
one can observe, to sincere Christians it becomes easy. 

I frankly confess that I have never clearly understood 
the doctrine of the Atonement in the New Testament or 
in modern theologies, but I can at least appreciate that 
it has a meaning quite remote from such grotesque rep- 
resentations of it as laid hold even on so great a man as 
Milton. I am sure that the thought of God’s forgive- 
ness, as needed by us and as given freely to those who 
seek it, is one which normally lays hold of those who try 
to keep mentally and morally alive; I am sure too that 
we rightly link it with the idea of Christ “who loved us 
and gave himself for us.” Nor, I confess, does it trouble 
my assurance that on this, as on at least one other great 
question which I have passed over, I could not frame any 
more precise statement in terms which would be satis- 
factory to me. 

Something of the same sort I might be able to say about 
more than one Christian doctrine which I will not here 
touch. But no man can write or read such reflections as 
these without becoming all the more aware of questions 
striking at the roots — not so much, I[ think, of Chris- 
tianity in particular as of the beliefs in a good and living 
God and in immortality, which are not confined to it. 
May not the mind that is perplexed by them find rest by 
grasping the certain fact of its own limitations, and then 
seeking the full significance of such few other things as are 


292 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


equally certain? A considerable part at least of the 
doubts that arise about these fundamental beliefs of 
Christianity are simply due to the boundary, indefinable 
but inexorable, which shuts in human thought; in other. 
words, equal doubt would assail the opposite beliefs if we 
once started to take those seriously as things that should 
govern life. A world ruled by God seems inconceivable — 
but so does the world anyhow. A good God coéxistent 
with evil is inconceivable — so too is any goodness that 
does not pass through strife. And it does not follow that 
we had best let the thought of God alone. Time is in- 
conceivable; when did it begin? Yet at a certain hour 
the train will start — at least, at a certain hour the tide 
will turn. Far more insistent than these metaphysical 
doubts are some which might seem easier to settle if it 
were a mere matter of chopping logic. We have most of 
us had experiences, really terrible at the time, of which 
we think as gayly now as a schoolboy of a hack at foot- 
ball — nay, for which we do thank God. ‘This is an 
analogy which may carry us far. But there are agonies 
of which the actual sufferer will never, while life lasts, 
feel aught but agony, and it is seemingly the best and 
bravest hearts that are wounded thus. Weep by all 
means “with them that weep,” but beware how you 
offer them your facile consolation; beware how you 
press on them your cheap-bought faith in God. Here I 
will merely say that there is a mystery of pain before 
which faith staggers. 

It is nevertheless right to say that amiable and clever 
people have entertained objections to religion of a sort 
which verge upon being ludicrous, for they rest upon the 
assumption that what can be should be cut to the measure 
of their understanding; the demand that what the world 
calls incomprehensible ought at least to be “explained to 





EPILOGUE 293 


a gentleman like me.” Grave instructors of the last 
generation have told young Christians that their creed 
was exploded by the Copernican system of astronomy — 
it could last only so long as the earth was thought the 
centre of the universe, with the other planets and the 
fixed stars with their probable planets as tiny luminaries 
going round it. Their idea may have been that so small 
a planet as the earth could be no object of interest to a 
mind. which, though supposed omniscient, had many 
larger worlds to attend to. Or they may only have meant 
that serious Christian theology purported to be an ex- 
haustive account of all the workings of God’s mercy. 
Either of these would be rather a foolish thought. So 
too it is somewhat infantile, though natural, when we 
ask, at times, What is Heaven? It is contemptible when 
people ask sarcastically whether the saints will be for- 
ever playing the harp, or forever attending a round of 
philanthropic committees. The simple remark that “I 
speak as a child”’ or that I ‘see through a glass, darkly ”’ 
deprives of all logical force those objections to Christianity 
which come from mere dissatisfaction with the fact that 
we know little. Questions here throng in upon me: 
What real meaning do I give to immortality? Where 
are the dead? What are the dealings of God’s mercy 
with such intelligences as probably dwell in the other 
planets, far off? What are those dealings with animals 
so near akin to us; with my own dog who loved me so; 
with animals further removed from us? How is the 
soul related to the body? What becomes of its con- 
‘tinuous life in those strange cases of interrupted con- 
sciousness, even of divided personality, of which we hear, 
and in the more familiar and more awful case of madness? 
And soon. ‘‘What is that to thee? Follow thou me.” 

There is, therefore, a strong temptation to disregard 


204 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


intimations and hints that we receive, because they come 
in the midst of a cloud of problems which are insoluble 
to us, but which have no bearing whatever upon anything 
that we have to do to-day. But it seems that is a temp-. 
tation to be set aside. I may have more to say upon that 
point, but here I will at once avow the effect upon my 
own mind of sundry thoughts which I have in part in- 
dicated above, though only in part. I have been more or 
less revolving them in my mind at intervals during many 
years; and whether it be reasonable or not, it is in fact 
the consequence of this that I find myself, somewhat to 
my surprise, a very ordinary Christian in my beliefs. It 
has ceased to be a matter of doubt with me that there is 
a living God, and simultaneously with the passing of that 
doubt I have come to believe that the nature of that 
living God was revealed to man in Jesus Christ. I make 
this personal confession, not from any liking for confes- 
sions, but because I feel sure that countless others have 
passed through the same stages of thought. They would 
differ in the explicitness of their convictions ; some would 
have been more impressed by one point and some by 
another; the experiences of no two would coincide ex- 
actly; but in the general upshot the similarity would be 
far greater than the dissimilarity. Perhaps an equal or 
larger number of Christians have at no particular time 
felt their whole religious belief to be matter of doubt. 
They have found out early that the faith in which they 
had been brought up made them better; conscience has 
prompted them clearly to take it as a whole and be loyal 
to it; the exact meaning of and evidence for this or that 
detail of doctrine has not struck them as a question that 
concerned them greatly, nor have any of those specula- 
tive puzzles which they know could be raised about it all. 
Such a position is no sign of any lack in intellectual 


EPILOGUE 295 


power or in intellectual honesty. There are people of 
this kind, and there are people of an opposite kind, who 
have a strong impulse of inquiry and who like to travel 
through life with the smallest possible amount of baggage 
in the way of fixed general principles. Neither kind has 
any call to envy or to pity the other. And the difference 
between them is less than it might seem. One goes 
through a certain sort of reflection and experience before 
he definitely accepts a belief; another goes through sub- 
stantially the same before what he accepted in reasonable 
deference to that which reasonably seemed authority 
acquires in all respects meaning and point for him. Each, 
in a rather different way, is coming up against the 
mysterious world of reality. 

I have to underline one point which might be overlooked 
in the foregoing remarks. I must face the question 
whether the sort of mental process which I have indicated 
as leading men to Christianity is really a reasonable one. 
For the most part what I shall further say relates to 
thoughts and influences which make Christianity hard to 
accept. 

The sort of conviction which I have stated involves a 
decided breach with a tendency of thought discernible 
now among religious as well as non-religious writers, in 
regard to what is called the “supernatural.” It is better 
to recognize this breach, though the point is hard to put 
accurately. The Bible is full of alleged miraculous occur- 
rences, about which we can now understand how easily 
they might have been believed to happen when they did 
not happen. Sometimes, when we might get over their 
mere unlikelihood, we cannot so easily get over the likeli- 
hood that they should have been falsely believed. This 
demands (on the part of people who are drawn to the 
subject) a skeptical attitude about a group of questions 


296 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


upon which, for two reasons, I shall say no more. They 
are in some of their aspects novel and it has been hardly 
possible that they should yet be calmly and adequately 
weighed up. On the other hand, I make bold to say that - 
they are far less important than controversialists on 
either side make out. 

But a more pressing question lies behind. It is often 
said that God works by law. This sounds reasonable. 
But it seems often to be implied that He works only by 
the sort of law of which by scientific observation we can 
win some precise knowledge — knowledge which we may 
expect (say) in a century or so to be fitted neatly into 
the same scheme with our knowledge of physics and of 
biology, and knowledge of that demonstrable kind of 
which the proof is plain to clever and educated men and 
which only stupid or ignorant men are apt to reject. 
This is, I think, a very common assumption. Surely, 
however, when once it is clearly stated and steadily con- 
templated, it must be seen to be quite unwarrantable. 
It rests upon two facts: that people in many ages and 
countries have been credulous about miracles, and that 
there is a very wide — and widening — field of phenomena 
within which a startling amount of exact and ordered 
knowledge has now been and is being obtained. But the 
gap between these data and the conclusion thus drawn 
seems a very wideone. Anyhow, Christian belief is incom- 
patible with that conclusion. Of course it does not sup- 
pose the existence of different orders of being or different 
classes of phenomena such that complete or ideal knowl- 
edge would be unaware of their true relation to one an- 
other. But it does suppose the truth and the importance 
for us of facts which (for any practical purpose of our 
own) we must treat as quite remote from the realm of 
working physical science — still further remote, it may 





EPILOGUE 297 


be well to add, from the realm of the “‘occult.’’ This 
supposition is involved when we believe in any dealing of 
God with man or with the human race which is remotely 
analogous to a good man’s dealings with other men, and 
which is not analogous to any dealings which so far as we 
are aware He has (say) with crystals; any seeking by 
Him of man’s soul, or response of His to man’s search. 

If in any proper sense we believe that Jesus Christ 
brought a culminating revelation of God to man, which 
had long been led up to, or again if we believe that man 
can by prayer put himself into some peculiar and direct 
relation to God’s will, we accept the supernatural, as it 
seems to me, in a manner to which the whole strong 
tendency of which I have spoken runs counter. If we 
believe that “‘ God is love,’ we believe that which a vast 
accumulation of facts of science tends to make at first 
sight highly improbable. It is best to face all this quite 
frankly. 

I am all the more bound to ask whether the kind of 
process by which I have described many minds (including 
my own) as brought to Christianity is a rational process, 
or is it, rather, a gradual giving way to some irrational 
sentiment or emotion. Nobody need suppose for a mo- 
ment that it is an instance of believing a thing because 
it would be pleasant to believe it. A modern English- 
man of mature years, with a healthy body and abundant 
interests in life, is most unlikely to worry much — as in 
former times, I suppose, many people have done — about 
what will happen to his own little soul at death, or to be 
greatly drawn to speculations or dreams which he might 
reasonably be rid of. Life to the last, and almost at the 
worst, is rich in sources of happiness (‘‘There’s a wind 
on the heath, brother,”’ the atheist gipsy said, when asked 
how he would feel if he were old and blind) ; and as for its 


298 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


sorrows, the “consolations of religion’”’ vamped up for the 
purpose would avail little against any great grief. ‘Those 
of the most genuine religion do not seem necessarily to 
abate its poignancy. As a matter of fact, I expect that. 
a nervous craving to keep one’s religious faith as a rule 
intensifies every religious doubt; nor do I believe that 
sensible men are often led to accept Christianity without 
a strong impulse to be dead honest and to deal with true 
facts only. Still, even if I had presented far more ably 
than I could and far more fully than I would the line of 
thought which I have faintly indicated, I think that 
many readers would have said: This does suggest that 
Christianity is useful and salutary to the highest life of 
those who happen to believe it; so it may be; but its 
truth, in fact, is quite another matter, which demands a 
awa sort af proof. 

This raises a very deep question, on which, neverthes 
less, it may be possible to say quite briefly something 
cual is philosophically sound and which, with reason- 
able attention, will be intelligible. 

There certainly cannot be any proof of Christianity in 
the sense in which facts in issue must be proved in a law 
court, or in the somewhat different sense in which facts 
certainly known to science can be proved. This of course 
is equally true (though very young people or very un- 
educated people may imagine otherwise) of any philos- 
ophy which would necessitate the rejection of Christianity, 
or of any general view not claiming to be a regular phi- 
losophy, which involves the same consequence. It is true 
also even of such an assertion as that we cannot know, 
or that it does not matter. If there could be, in this 
sense, proof of Christianity or of any of these other opin- 
ions, there would not now be honest, capable, and well- 
informed men who reject that proof. And in the case of — 





EPILOGUE 299 


any religious belief this is not at all a sad fact. The 
abstract information that God had been discovered would 
in itself be as useless a piece of information as we could 
possess. Indeed, religious history shows that the quite 
complacent acceptance on authority of this dogma and 
some that may easily be accepted with it may be far 
worse than useless. Obviously the conviction that God 
exists can be useful to anybody only by reason of some 
profound reaction of awe and of love which it produces 
in his mind. And here one may notice the impressive 
fact that in some minds the inquiry about God or about 
the world seems to be the effective thing — not the defi- 
nite and profound conclusion; so much so that great 
atheists or agnostics have sometimes borne a curious 
sort of family resemblance to great teachers, whatever 
may be the case with their followers. 

The apprehension of God— and of cognate truths to 
which I need not recur—is really a part, even if it be 
thought a superfluous and fallacious part, of a most mys- 
terious process of apprehending the real world, in which 
every human mind goes some distance. At a very early 
stage, perhaps not the earliest but long before memory 
begins, every child gets some working idea of space, 
material objects, its own body, and so on. If you think 
of the process of sensations, affections (one rapidly pass- 
ing into another) of eye, ear, touch, sense of muscular 
movement, taste, and smell, with a closely related process 
of appetite accompanying it all, in which the whole thing 
began; and then if you wonder how you first conceived 
the notions that you saw a thing, wanted it, could put 
out your hand and so perhaps take it, you feel as if 
you must by then have done something comparable to 
the hugest scientific inference ever performed by any 
grown-up sage; you really know about it only that this 


300 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


inconceivable feat has for countless years been instinc- 
tive and inevitable. 

The instinctive process of learning merges more and 
more after a while into a consciously rational process; ~ 
the merger is again a thing which seems to defy anal- 
ysis; only it does always happen and it is never quite 
complete. Simultaneously, though in most people much 
less complete, the appetite side of the business (the re- 
action of the muscles and the soul to an empty or full 
state of belly and the like) is merging into the exercise 
of deliberate will — a thing so imperfect in some men as 
to result in little more than a habit of painful and dis- 
astrous hesitation. Comparing ourselves with more in- 
stinctive animals who are also more the creatures of 
appetite, we see that on both sides the change brings 
greater risks of error and far greater chances of achieve- 
ment. (Of this the most momentous example is, of 
course, the conversion of reproductive power into a con- 
sciously directed means of enjoyment, the basis, as the 
case may be, of lust or of love.) All the while, moreover, 
the growing creatures’ intercourse with other creatures 
is developing; their thoughts are being more fully ex- 
changed, their desires conflicting or combining more 
actively. Up to a certain point most of us are learning 
much the same things at much the same pace. In later 
years greater differences have set in. One mind grows 
mainly in one direction and another in another. One is 
still going on rapidly, another very slowly or not at all. 
Most exhibit in some respects surprising limitations. 
Most might, if we knew, surprise us by the advance made 
in some particular direction. In some after a time there 
is, upon the whole, retrogression. Some, though with a 
certain loss and shrinkage, will on the whole be growing 
to the end. So long as the process lasts it preserves a 


EPILOGUE 301 


certain continuity with its first beginning. Its first be- 
ginning, so far as we can see, must be described as the 
awaking of the child to the sense of real things or of a 
real world independent of itself but related to itself. Its 
progress to the very end must be regarded as the exten- 
sion and articulation, very irregularly and intermittently, 
of that same sense of a vast, real world related to him. 
Now let us glance for a moment at the huge and or- 
dered store of knowledge, chiefly of what we may call the 
material universe, which is now the common possession 
of civilized mankind; no individual possesses it all, and 
most of us possess only a very little of it. After a pause 
of many centuries, the codperation of many men and the 
leadership of a comparatively few men of great intellect 
(and as a rule of saintly disinterestedness) have within 
the last dozen generations achieved results which are 
dazzling to contemplate. Much of the knowledge now 
possessed about the constitution of matter and about 
organic life is of a kind which an unlearned person, like 
myself, can take in, if at all, only by a violent disturbance 
of his ordinary ways of imagining the world, and of a 
kind which, at first hearing, he may be inclined to say 
could never be known. Yet (subject of course to cor- 
rection in part) it is known; for it is the consistent putting 
together of innumerable observed facts, and it works when 
tested by application in practice. All this amazing knowl- 
edge is the further and further extension of the child’s 
process of apprehending reality—an extension which 
can manifestly proceed more rapidly and to greater dis- 
- tances in some directions than in others. Sometimes it 
seems to contradict entirely some among the early con- 
ceptions in which we might have thought that we had 
the surest hold on reality, as for example that the sun 
goes round the earth. Those early conceptions are 


302 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


shown to have been partial but only partial apprehen- 
sions of the fact. Science’s own early progress has in 
many matters been made by forming theories, far more 
subtle indeed than those conceptions of the ordinary ~ 
mind, but with an even larger element of misapprehen- 
sion in them, and requiring to be rapidly scrapped. 
In some respects at least the theories eventually verified 
present themselves as, in a sense which we can easily 
grasp, only relatively true. A yet completer view of 
the truth has to be conceived of as in a sense possible, 
but sometimes as unlikely ever to be attained by men. 
In some directions an almost limitless extension of knowl- 
edge seems conceivable. In others, progress if any has 
been slight, and limits, perhaps not sharply drawn but 
still very appreciable, seem to be set to further progress. 
Our whole knowledge of material things, in which along 
certain lines investigation walks with sure feet, is sur- 
rounded by a fringe of questions from which inquiring 
minds — such as first began to create science — have been 
unable to refrain, but in which each definite and confident 
theory put forward seems destined to be punctured. Such 
are the questions which might seem to be fundamental to 
all knowledge: What, for example, do we mean by mat- 
ter, or by space, or by time? Some slight advance is 
made, for the first crude fallacies that arise are punc- 
tured and set aside, but it is very slight and men learn 
that we can get along without more. On the whole, a 
great mass of very solid and in many ways serviceable 
knowledge results; and it may be hoped that it would 
now seem to anyone absurd to doubt its validity. But 
it did not always seem absurd. On the contrary, some 
men of the sort that are responsible for the whole ad- 
vance early began to doubt whether any portion of our 
knowledge was really known. Some decided that nothing 


EPILOGUE 303 


could be known; and some carried skepticism a step 
further and answered that this itself was an assertion 
which could not be known to be true. It is enough for 
us that, from the first experimental effort (so to conceive 
of it) of an infant to take hold of a rattle or a colored ball 
to the latest successful handling by science of invisible 
radiations, or of particles a million times smaller than 
the smallest thing we see, the human mind is progressively 
extending its partial contact (so to call it) with that vast 
reality, inscrutably related to us, including us yet dis- 
tinct from us, of which we each had our first apprehension 
before we canremember. ‘Those first steps which we have 
all taken in grasping that there are real things at all were 
of a kind of which cur adult understanding and imagina- 
tion can conceive no clear account. ‘That the ultimate 
advance has been in some directions so immense is due 
mainly to the resolution of men whom their fellows at 
the time could not follow, as it were, one yard. It 
remains the “index”’ of one and another 


mind, forever 
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone. 


But, to return to the child, the perception of material 
objects in space (or, more strictly, the indescribable 
psychic process which develops into that perception) is 
not the only line along which it wins increased contact 
with the reality around it. Ever so early there dawns 
on it the recognition of a person other than itself. Nor- 
mally that first person is one who loves the child, and 
whose love at a certain stage the child begins both to 
recognize and to return. Other persons soon come 
within its horizon and are gradually distinguished and 
identified ; generally animals come soon upon the scene. 
Very soon indeed the great and endless business of 
communicating with and dealing with other persons, 


304 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


recognized as having intelligences and wills like our own, 
is well on its way. None of us dreams of doubting that 
these other persons exist.. That in one way they are 
material things, as bottles and beds and tables are, is 
certain; that in another way they are not material is 
equally certain, because we gain much sure knowledge 
of their ways of thinking and desiring without necessarily 
having even the very faintest perception of the processes 
in their bodies to which these things correspond. Scien- 
tific psychology had made a good (though soon arrested) 
start before consciousness had even been located, as it 
were, in the brain. Knowledge of persons is thus in a 
way quite distinct from knowledge about their bodily 
being and its processes; it remains distinct from it, how- 
ever much it is at some points usefully supplemented 
by it; and it is obviously — after some primary bodily 
needs are satisfied — as important as knowledge of mat- 
ter, if not more so. It is of no use (say) to make gram- 
ophones if you cannot persuade some people to buy them. 
If (remembering that there may be a danger of fallacy 
in the distinction) we think of this knowledge of persons 
on, so to speak, their immaterial side, it is in some respects 
very unlike our knowledge of physics. The stirring of 
some emotion, sympathy, or antipathy far more marked 
and conscious than the emotion which does in some 
degree accompany all perception and thought and action, 
seems necessary to every exercise of perception, reflec- 
tion, or will in regard to our fellows. The subject matter 
of this sort of knowledge and action is in many respects 
far more various in different individual cases and in each 
individual case from moment to moment and from year 
to year than the subject matter of physical science gener- 
ally is. Our thought concerning persons is in a manner 
hard to analyze, manifestly more liable to wild error, and 


EPILOGUE 305 


yet manifestly more capable of sure and flashing insight. 
Its greatest certainties — known for certain by the man, 
perhaps still more often by the woman, who has them — 
are often peculiarly inarticulate; not unreasonable, but 
incapable of being formally reasoned out without great 
effort, if at all. “I donot like thee, Doctor Fell.” Along 
with all this goes the marked fact that personal knowl- 
edge, knowledge about our friend or enemy or about 
humanity in general, is, comparatively speaking, insus- 
ceptible of being conveyed from one man to another with 
any sort of exactness. It is very bad subject matter for 
scientific method and system, and for instruction. No- 
body, however, can doubt on that account that contact 
with our fellows is contact with reality. 

To finish with the growth of the child: At some early 
stage natural affection becomes real, soon a conscious 
force; and at some stage ideas appear which develop in 
slightly different forms into a sense of duty or a sense of 
right and wrong. Here, perhaps more noticeably than 
anywhere else, the phases which different minds go 
through differ; the process is capable of arrest and delay 
in some respects in some cases, and this often apparently 
without ultimate loss; the counteracting influences pres- 
ent in all growth are here peculiarly strong; the fluctua- 
tions caused by them are to the end of life very great; 
the arrival at something which may be called maturity 
is in most cases relatively late; the progress may be re- 
aroused to great activity after long intervals, at almost 
any age; it may, apparently, continue to be considerable 
to the last moment of sane life. So far as it isa matter of 
knowledge, as to some extent it is, what could be said 
about its susceptibility to scientific method and to com- 
munication to others would evidently be somewhat differ- 
ent from what has been said of our knowledge of matter 


306 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


and of our knowledge of men. In this connection the 
doubt whether our ideas correspond with reality has been 
raised and debated, just as it has sometimes been in regard 
to physical science, but naturally more often and more 
intensely. All of us have at some time, and may per- 
haps at any moment still have, acute accesses of that 
doubt. Yet any thoroughgoing skepticism is at least as 
absurd in this as in the other case. Any attempt to per- 
suade one’s self that one’s happiness, the aim of one’s 
underlying and lasting desires, the fulfillment of one’s 
being (or what not) can be found either on sensual or in 
any sense on selfish lines, breaks down under the stress 
of a thoroughly skeptical sifting of it or under the stress 
of practical occasions. Man cannot escape his privilege 
as an animal, having — like others of the higher animals, 
though not always so much as some of them— impe- 
rious instincts, directed not to the preservation or enjoy- 
ment of the individual but to the preservation of the 
race, at the cost if need be of utter and cruel individual 
sacrifice. Nor can he escape his privilege or doom, as 
by far the most rational of animals, compelled to trans- 
mute his instincts into something more potent and more 
perilous. His unselfish instincts (for, as applied to in- 
stinct, the much-debated word “unselfish” is evidently 
significant and correct) must with him pass into thought 
and conscious desire, applied or definitely and disas- 
trously failing to be applied over a range very consider- 
ably wider than the mere preservation of the species. It 
is at bottom nonsense (the rational mind cannot for long, 
when fully aroused, entertain it) to think of this direction 
of thought and desire as if it strayed into some realm of 
idle fancy. My frequent obtuseness to delicate or indeed 
to elementary moral considerations no more stays the 
Operation of what may be called moral law than my 





EPILOGUE 307 


obtuseness in mathematics deflects a shot fromagun. The 
first moral perceptions of the child and the boldest ad- 
vance made upon them by a hero or a prophet represent 
alike the movements of a mind extending its contact with 
reality. 

As a matter of fact, alert and vigorous minds, not only 
those of genius but those of simple, healthy people, inter- 
ested in their duty, interested in men and women, in- 
terested in the mighty powers of the physical universe, 
do apprehend or seem to apprehend the facts with which 
religion is concerned. It makes no more difference in 
this instance than in that of physical science that their 
early efforts in these directions have often been very 
crude. Nor does it make any difference that some people 
are uninterested, and that some people totally misunder- 
stand the highest experiences of religion. A certain 
progress, great though fluctuating, can be observed in 
this regard in the history of the race and in the lives of 
numberless entirely healthy and sane individuals. Here, 
more than elsewhere, skepticism has been active, often — 
as in the case of physics—on the part of men of the 
very type to whom progress is due. And here again one 
can now say with some decision that thorough skepticism 
ends by being skeptical of itself. Prima facie, any intelli- 
gent glance over the diverse mental activities of our fel- 
lows would suggest that here certainly is a direction, per- 
haps the chief, in which men’s minds grasp not vainly 
after reality. 

I shall not attempt to explore any further this region 
into which I have timidly entered. One can look at the 
matter from the outside; all of us at times feel genuinely 
outsiders in this respect, but we cannot, if we are quite 
honest, declare that anything is the less there because 
we feel thus. So looking at it, I should observe, in the 


308 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


first place, where lies the real answer to my question 
about the value, as evidence of the truth of certain beliefs, 
of considerations which might at first sight seem only to 
affect their moral and social utility. What happens inthat . 
sort of reflection by which (as I have slightly indicated) 
men are actually led to become decided Christians, or, 
having previously been so, are kept so and made more 
so, is this: Men and women alive to the many elements 
in life, in the world, in their own inner experience, which 
stir wonder, admiration, hope, love, become conscious of 
lines on which innumerable apprehensions of something 
which we must rationally take as real cohere together, ° 
consistently, in some roughly definite creed. Uncon- 
sciously they test it all the while by its power of supply- 
ing some partial answer to questions “which cannot be 
put by,” and which for that very reason should seem to have 
no fanciful origin. They test them by their power to 
suggest lines of duty which, when followed, satisfy; by 
their correspondence with that to which countless other 
apparently wiser minds testify ; by their observed power, 
when followed, to make them better, and their no less 
indubitable power, when disregarded, to leave them 
worse. Such is the only evidential process by which 
Christian faith can be put to the proof, or by which 
(if you make such a supposition) you can put to the proof 
that more scientific view of the world which you may 
think would oust Christian faith and replace it; or by 
which you can make it rationally conceivable that in 
this region of thought no creed at all can be found and 
that none matters. And it is a sufficient evidential pro- 
cess — subject to this single observation: that in this 
direction, even more than in others, the mind that is to 
learn must observe that a creed merely taken from 
another quite on trust neither is really believed nor, if 





EPILOGUE | 309 


believed, would be of the faintest use. This is in harmony 
with the general process by which knowledge is won. 
The mind discovers its own health in its contact (neces- 
sarily imperfect) with what thereby it inevitably and 
irrefutably apprehends as an element in the real world. 

I would say, moreover, that what I may call the par- 
ticular religious experiences of the individual mind — 
liable, no doubt, in each of us to some measure of indi- 
vidual error— are in this matter strictly analogous to 
those perceptions by which the child learns that there 
are things and that there are persons, and to those pro- 
founder visions by which genius has seen deep into the 
working of the world’s machinery. There is error in 
them to be eliminated. ‘There is also certainty. I have 
not myself those experiences of prayer to which the 
strongest and the sanest minds that I have known have — 
in due privacy— confessed; much less of vision, such 
as in certain ages and races has come to some men with 
unmistakable assurance and to the manifest and amazing 
benefit of the world. But, writing in perfectly cold 
blood, remote from any temptation to lament my imper- 
fections, I say deliberately: To doubt that in these 
things men come in contact with God seems to me an 
absurdity, which mature thought outgrows. 

This now remains to be said, and said with all possible 
emphasis: The religious apprehension comes first not 
as an assertion but as a command. Christ does not 
come to you or to me saying, “I am the Christ.” Without 
explanation He says, “Do likewise’’; ‘Arise and walk.” 
His promise of a fuller light that we shall walk in lies 
behind this. He would seem (be it reverently said) to be 
uninterested in my opinion about Him or in yours, but 
to show an example and to say, “Follow”’; to claim serv- 
ice; to claim— as the child’s mother claims— the first 


310 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


faint stirrings of love, before it can be distinctly seen that 
He is there. Such seems upon the whole to have been 
the view of St. John. 

Difficult as this may be to understand, it is perhaps 
the chief answer to the question so perplexing to young 
men: How can I pretend to be a Christian, how can I 
pray, when so many preliminary puzzles present them- 
selves, of which I cannot honestly pretend to accept 
another man’s ready-made solution? God, it may be, 
does not present Himself to you as God, but God’s serv- 
ice does present itself to you in the ceaseless, generally 
trivial, opportunities of doing something a little above 
your ordinary level, something beyond what the world, 
your class, your business, your boon companions demand. 
You may become more alive to these calls, or you may 
become less alive. You can choose. If your choice is 
once to hear them, you can renew your choice. You can 
at least take some moments by yourself to strengthen the 
decision of that choice. If there is a God, He takes these 
moments as prayer, and doubtless He has His own ways 
of answering and His own time. 

Meanwhile, the first duty is to be sincere toward 
yourself and the world. Only — since after all you are 
probably going to let yourself off something on the ground 
of sincerity — be quite thorough with the sincerity. It 
is not at all easy. Perhaps this simple reminder is better 
than any analysis of the very obvious ways in which 
humbug and cowardice may take one to church or keep 
one away, or in which fidgety minds may skip or torpid 
minds drift to one conclusion or its opposite. 

But I believe it is in every way helpful to recall that 
Christ demands sincerity. It is helpful, among other 
ways, in preventing that agony of religious questioning — 
attempting to force one’s belief and never succeeding 


EPILOGUE 311 


— to which more people than we suspect may be prone, 
but which surely is not God’s desire. This demand for 
sincerity is a fact about Christ’s religion which modern 
study reads quite clear in the Bible. And it is one of the 
dark stains on the history of all Churches, for many cen- 
turies, that not only ecclesiastics but congregations and 
crowds of Christians have so often been the enemies of 
any fearless quest of truth or any straightforward telling 
of it. Even now some preachers and their congregations 
speak just as if conformity instead of truth could lawfully 
be made the primary aim. It would not be fair to say 
this without adding that the exact parallel holds good in 
politics and in other walks of life, conceivably even in 
some scientific pursuits. The fact is that it is harder and 
more unusual than we sometimes recognize for men to 
value truth, as such, very highly. That hard and unusual 
thing Christ demands. It would be slightly inaccurate 
to say that it was His primary demand, because life 
must not be artificially simplified by picking out some 
one element in the right thing and putting it alone; but 
along with some other things, honest facing of fact was 
an essential part of that childlike simplicity and single- 
ness of heart which was His primary demand. 

It requires a rather considerable study before the mean- 
ing of His startling phrase, “I am the truth,” or of the 
equally startling dialogue with Pilate, in the Gospel 
according to St. John, begins to stand out; but one or 
two things may be summarily said about all this. There 
is no trace of His having ever demanded of anyone assent 
- to a proposition which he could not understand and had 
no reason to think true. He apparently claimed from 
the doctors of Jewish divinity at least an open mind 
toward new truths that issued from that divinity. He 
evidently required of His disciples, at the end, that they 


giz ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


should see clearly what had long been dawning on them. 
His attitude to people generally was not this. Rather, 
He demanded fuller reverence of what they did revere; 
the practical performance of what they did hold right; ~ 
attention to and retention of teaching which did appeal 
to them; above all, the response of efficient mercy to 
what did stir the sentiment of compassion. Of men to- 
day, even when reasons good or bad have detached them 
from a childlike piety, He demands instantly a certain 
spirit of action, and demands therewith that they go 
along their way with “a heart that watches and receives.” 

He did, however, demand “faith,” a word which gives 
men pause. The New Testament applauds faith in a 
way which is sometimes understood as contrasting it 
with reason. But faith is assumed to believe something 
true, so it cannot be intended to contrast it with reason. 
What was it which the men— Abraham especially — 
whom the New Testament treats as types of faith were 
disregarding and setting aside, when they showed their 
faith? Nothing that was really reasonable, but a num- 
ber of strong influences which might naturally — not 
reasonably — have deterred them from undertaking what 
they did undertake and from persisting in it. These 
disregarded things included, on the one hand, conventional 
opinion and thelike ; and on theother hand allthe plausible 
reasons for disbelief which personal fear and indolence 
would have suggested to them — two classes of influences 
which a Greek philosopher would have grouped together 
as things which create illusion, and which he would have 
opposed to reason or wisdom. Far from being merely 
submissive to authority, as a later confused use of the 
term “faith” suggests, these men of faith showed in the 
first instance great independence. They showed besides 
great courage and energy and pertinacity. It should be 





EPILOGUE A143 


added that they showed also a spirit of adventure; they 
did commit themselves and take personal risks at a time 
when their friends probably thought that they should 
still have been making inquiries. These are qualities 
which Jesus asked of His disciples, and qualities to which 
Christianity appeals to-day. 

Yet on what sort of ground does the supposed virtue of 
faith commit itself? In the particular case of the dis- 
ciples we can see clearly enough. We ourselves have 
experiences on a smaller scale of profoundly felt trust or 
distrust of persons. It may be based on traits of appear- 
ance, manner, voice, speech, too subtle to be well de- 
scribed. It may result from inference so rapid that we 
(incorrectly) call it “‘instinctive’’ or so gradual that we 
actually forget its stages. But we very seldom regret 
having been guided by it, and very often regret not having 
been so. 

A personality strangely commanding and lovable got 
the trust of Simon Peter and his fellows. They went on 
giving that trust, and it grew. Ultimately, we are told, 
the slow-dawning conviction broke on Simon Peter that 
this was, and no other could be, that ultimate leader 
whom, as Jews, he and his fellows had learned to expect, 
and to whom, as loyal Jews, they must give their loyalty 
without stint. It has been the aim of this volume to 
suggest how from that original loyalty the Christian 
creed grew. 

Now the appeal which Christ can make to us is as dif- 
ferent as possible in form from that which He made to 
those disciples. We cannot see Jesus. We are beset by 
good influences, pervasive but therefore indefinable. 
The most definite witness to each of us is, instead of the 
living Master of life, the witness of some sect or school 
humanly liable to enervate, warp, narrow, or degrade 


314 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


Christianity in some degree, to insist on what is at best 
unimportant, to set up patterns of life which we cannot 
love, to depreciate and distrust what any healthy man or 
woman must admire; yet we know — for the indifferent 
world recognizes —that Christ is greater than all Chris- 
tians. And there is hardly less difference in the response 
which we can make to Hisappeal. Not only in his circum- 
stances but in his whole temperament a modern English- 
man contrasts with an ancient Jew. The old Jew at his 
best was tense; at his worst, horribly fanatical; he could 
have ecstasies and, it seems, be none the worse for them; 
his convictions were expressed with great vehemence, with 
fearless exaggeration of phrase, and with a crude luxu- 
riance of metaphor; his merriment was of a type which 
could be invited by St. Paul to express itself in psalms ; 
tenderness, homely sense, exact hitting of the nail upon 
the head, abound in the literature which appealed to 
him, but they never took a humorous turn. The English- 
man, of the kind that we like to think characteristic, is 
very seldom strung up except for purposes of important 
action. ‘The extraordinary poetic and imaginative power 
of which his race has proved itself capable is subtly de- 
pendent upon something regarded by others as specially 
prosaic and matter of fact in the ordinary demeanor of 
that race; his strongest conviction is often that which 
he is most shy and reserved in uttering; his profoundest 
emotions and most genuine reverence normally express 
themselves by quiet ; his warmest kindliness and his most 
exact justice of mind flourish best in an atmosphere of 
humor, though all the same that humor must be still in 
specially sacred moments. On the whole, our specifically 
religious feeling must have something of the character of 
a deep, unobserved undercurrent. Our religious thought 
welcomes a certain indefiniteness and illogicality (falsely 





EPILOGUE 316 


so called) which is a virtue, though it has its defects, and 
which is connected equally with the practical and with 
the poetic qualities of the best English minds. Some 
equivalent difference between the modern and the an- 
cient could be traced in every nation to-day, and should 
in no case be assumed to be bad. Yet when we recognize 
the full difference in any possible religious experience 
between us and the first Christians, the abiding signifi- 
cance of many New Testament ideas only stands out 
more clearly. 

I do not wish to elaborate a parallel which is in general 
already obvious; but I would wish in conclusion to 
leave three points clearly marked. 

Faith was and is primarily a matter of responding in 
action — unusual action —to the call of something of 
which a man is already quite aware and which he cannot 
honestly doubt. In the Apostles’ case it began with the 
literal following of One evidently, though inexplicably, 
worth following. In our case, every schoolboy, every 
man who has ever been a real student, or an athlete, or 
a good soldier, or a good workman, or what not — and 
the like with women— has repeatedly been aware of 
calls of fellowship, calls of sympathy, calls to get out of 
himself and silently enter on some life a little above the 
ordinary. It is impossible that he should rationally 
doubt the authority of those calls. Faith begins in his 
first energetic and determined response to them. The 
claim of Christianity is to be the creed and the way of 
living that are the fullest outcome of that response, long 
and honestly continued. Those who doubt that claim 
can patiently test it in life, with the quiet confidence that 
what they need to know will be clear enough in God’s 
good time. 

Faith never did and never can mean that a man should 


~. ~ 


316 ACCORDING TO SAINT JOHN 


begin by committing himself in advance to some definite 
theory of which he has no notion of the proof and perhaps 
does not understand the terms, though it certainly does 
demand a very different thing: some reverence for what 
we must see is worth revering, and some modest deference 
toward that of which we cannot reasonably despise the 
authority. 

Nevertheless, faith always did and always will exact 
much independence of the ordinary current of the world’s 
opinion, and of the influences which may for the moment 
surround us. In indifferent matters fashions are harm- 
less things, and certainly there is no merit in eccentricity. 
But there are graver things in which not to stand upon 
one’s own feet, but to seek first for the approval of those 
around us, is the surrender of all real self-respect; and 
in the gravest things even some seemingly steady tend- 
ency of civilization must not be allowed to set the ulti- 
mate standard. “How can ye believe which receive 
honour one of another?” The drift of the world sets at 
present away from all religion; at other times it has set 
and it may again set in another direction; but it never 
set in favor of any great surrender of self to what is truest 
or best. Christianity calls for a faith which indeed 
works only by love, but which yet overcomes the world. 
And whatever be the truth, it will not be truly seen, nor 
will life be lived in its light, except by those who, how- 
ever humble, dare sometimes stand alone. 


These pages have been much occupied with tracing 
how a patriotism, once fervently centred upon an insig- 
nificant state, ended by doing its part in founding what 
Augustine called “the most glorious City of God.” Iam 
not about to dwell here upon the measure in which, 
though far less than the old Israel, different nations 





EPILOGUE 317 


to-day, our own not least among them, may conceive 
themselves the humble custodians of some tradition for 
which God has His use in the world. But I call to mind, 
as I close, the lines in which a great public servant, who had 
faced as much for his own country as any son of any com- 
batant nation in the Great War, said the last word about 
his own career. Early in 1918 the British Ambassador 
in Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice, was about to leave 
that city, superseded. He was a sick man; as it hap- 
pened, he was to die within five weeks. He wrote thus : — 


I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above, 

Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love; 

The love that asks no questions, the love that stands the test, 
That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best; 

The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, 

The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice. 


And there’s another country I’ve heard of long ago, 

Most dear to them that love her, most great to them that know. 
We may not count her armies; we may not see her King; 

Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering ; 

And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase; 

And her ways are ways of gentleness, and all her paths are peace. 


We may not see her King. St. John believed that 
once and once for all that King had been seen upon this 
earth, and that his own hands had handled Him. For 
myself, I believe with all my heart that John was right. 
Many men much wiser than I can only wonder about it, 
as well they may. But for him who wonders and for 
him who believes the same thing is primarily needful — 
that his own steps be guided within those shining bounds. 





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INDEX 


Since the Contents provides a topical outline, the Index has been restricted to a 


brief list of most of the proper names in the volume. 


No attempt has been made 


to tabulate references to Christ, except as ‘‘ Messiah,” to the four Evangelists, or 
to such words as Israel, Gentiles, and the like. 


ABRAHAM, 269, 271, 312. 

Abrahams, Dr. I., 164 note. 

Adonis, 200. 

Alexander, 188, 254. 

Alexandria, 201. 

Ammon, 174. 

Amos, 171. 

Andrew, 33, 48 f., 126. 

Annas, 118. 

Antioch, 212. 

Antoninus Pius, 203. 

Apocrypha, 30, 160 f., 223. 

Apuleius, 207 f. 

Aramaic, 42, 80, 212, 216 and note, 254. 

Aristotle, 5, 190, 192, 195. 

Arnold, Matthew, 48, 172 note, 174, 277 
note. 

Reva 7271,1075 f.,.179- 

Athens, 189 f., 226. 

Attis, 200, 217, 232, 272. 

Augustine, 316. 

Augustus, 40. 


BAAL, 202. 

Baalim, 202. 

Babylon, 160, 171, 172 note, 184, 194. 

Balder, 200. 

Baptist, the, 33, 49, 62, 67, 71, 106, 114 f., 
247. 

Bar Cochba, 14 f., 167. 

Barnabas, 53 f7., 273. 

Bartholomew, 33. 

Baur, Ferdinand Christian, 15 7. 

Beethoven, 66. 

Bethany, 74. 

Bevan, Dr. Edwyn, 210. 

Bousset, Wilhelm, 209 note, 213, 216f., 
220 note, 230. 


Bozrah, 179. 

Bradley, A. C., 174 note. 
Bryce, Lord, 41. 

Burney, Professor, 42, 79. 


CamontT, FRANz, 210. 

Cenchrea, 201. 

Cerinthus, 26, 55. 

Charles, Archdeacon, 39 f7., 256 note. 
Claudius, 41. 

Cleanthes, 191. 

Clement of Alexandria, 22 7f., 26, 40, 56. 
Clement of Rome, 30, 122. 
Copernican system, 192, 293. 
Corinth, 201. 

Cybele, 200. 

Cy russel 77. 


Damascus, 47, 212, 224, 230. 

Daniel, 254 f., 256 note. 

David, 166 f., 169, 171, 174, 176f., 180 f., 
268. 

Dea Syra, 202. 

Despondency, 69. 

Dill, Dr. Samuel, 210. 

Disraeli, 253 note. 

Drummond, Dr., 79. 


' Epom, 174, 179. 


Egypt, 172, 176, 194, 271. 
Elamites, 203. 

Eleusis, 201. 

Elijah, 181. 

Eliot, George, 244. 
Enoch, 182, 255 note. 
Ephesus, 23, 36 ff. 
Epictetus, 210. 

Epicurus, 191. 


321 


B22 


Erasmus, 3. 
Eusebius, 36 f., 39. 
Ezekiel, 254, 256. 
Ezra, 182. 


FRANKLIN, SiR JoHN, 83. 


GALILEE, 48, 115, 182, 236. 

Gardner, Dr. Percy, 209 note, 218 f. 
George the Sinner, 39. 

Georgius Hamartolus, 43. 
Gethsemane, 51. 

Gideon, 183. 

Gore, Bishop, 161 note, 210, 257 note. 
Green, T. H., 277 note. 


HANDEL, 176. 

Hannibal, 200. 

Hart, 280 note. 

Heber, 179. 

Hegel, 17. 

Hermas, 209 note. 
Hermes, 197 f. 

Hermes Trismegistos, 197. 
Herod, 43, 53. 

Hezekiah, 173. 

Holland, Dr. Scott, 110, 114. 


IGNATIUS, 12, 37 ff. 

Imlah, 70. 

Irenzus, 22 7. 36, 39, 42. 

Isaac, 269. 

Isaiah, 171 ff. and notes, 174 note, 178 
note, 266, 270 note. 

Isis, 201, 208. 


Jaco, 178, 269. 

James, brother of Christ, 53 f. 

James, brother of John, 33, 43, 49 f., 122. 

James, brother of Jude, 240, 278. 

James, William, 47. 

Jerome, St., 36. 

Jerusalem, 11, 39, 110 f., 172 f. and note, 
477,106; 1203502 1257 21070290092 40502705 
2745278. 

Jesse, 173, 176f. 

Job, 70. 

Johannine books, 95, 159, 279; school, 


75. 
John, Elder or Presbyter, 36 f., 42. 
John the Baptist. See Baptist. 
Johnson, Dr., 129. 


Judah, 1717730 750-9003 


INDEX 


Judas Iscariot, 74, 77 note. 
Judas, not Iscariot, 33. 
Jude, St., 256 note. 

Justin Martyr, 14, 203. 


KiTcHENER, Lorp, 40. 


LamMB, CHARLES, 83. 
Levi, 167. 

Loisy, Abbé, 71, 73. 
Longfellow, 169. 
Luther, 129. 


MaccaBEES, 167, 182, 256 note. 

Magna Carta, 170. 

Malachi, 13. 

Martha, 74. 

Mary, 73 f. 

Matheson, Dr. P. E., 210. 

Medes, 203. 

Merodach-Baladan, 172 note. 

Mesopotamia, 271. 

Messiah, 14, 143f-, 147, I51, 165 ff, 
170, .180 f., 184,212, 225, 252n,eeane 
note, 255 /f., 266, 268, 271, 280. 

Micah, 174. . 

Micaiah, 70. 

Midianites, 183. 

Mill, John Stuart, 245. 

Milton, 69, 291. 

Mithras, 202 f., 272. 

Moab, 172, 174. 

Mohammed, 233. 

Montefiore, C. G., 164 note. 

Moses, 181, 223, 251, 266, 268, 271. 

Much-afraid, 69. 


“Muratorian Fragment,” 25. 


NaPIER, SIR WILLIAM, 85. 
Nathaniel. See Bartholomew. 
Nelson, 51. 

Nero, 40. 
Northumberland, 203. 


OLYMPUS, 193. 
Osiris, 201,;205; 2320240. 


PALESTINE, 63, 79, 160, 202, 270. 

Papias, 28, 36f., 39. 

Parthians, 203. 

Paul, St., 17 #5 41,475 53-5 Gos Gls au 
135 f., 140, 151 f., 188 f., 201 f., 205s 
212, 216, 218 f., 228 note, 236, 240f., 





INDEX 323 


256 note, 262 f., 265 f., 268 7., 276 note, { Sennacherib, 172 note f. 


289, 314. Serapis, 201. 
Pekah, 172. Shakespeare, 13, 62. 
Persia, 194, 203. Showerman, Grant, 210. 


Peter, St., 33, 41, 49 f+» 57, 75, 122, 131, | Sibyl, 23. 
138, 140, I51, 236, 240, 266, 268 #., | Socrates, 5, 190, 234, 244. 


iy oe 8 hee Spain, 41. 
Petrine school, 75. Stanton, Dr. Vincent, 14, 36, 70, 81, 107 
Pharisees, 115, 237. note, 210. 
Philip, St., 33, 126. Stephen, 140, 253, 270 f. 
Philistines, 174, 183. Stevenson, Robert Louis, 83. 
Philo, 63, 103. Syria, 172, 202, 204 note. 
Phoenicia, 204 note. 
Phrygia, 201 f. Tarsus, 212, 226 note, 230. 
Pilate, 72, 115, 144, 311. Tertullian, 22 f., 25. 
Plato, 84, 87, 91, 165, 190, 192, 197, 228, | Thammuz, 200. 

236, 267 note, 285. Thomas, St., 33. 
Plutarch, DOF: Thoth, 197. 
Polycarp, 12, 23. Thucydides, 68, 219. 
Polycrates, 24. Tiberius, 40. 


Presbyter. See John, Elder or Presbyter. | Trajan, 14, 40. 
Ptolemy, 201. 

Uzzian, Kino, 70. 
RABSHAKEH, 173. 


Reitzenstein, 209 note. 
eae VERGIL, 188. 


Rezin, 172. 
Rice, Cecil Spring, 317. 
Richmond, Canon, 110. WELLHAUSEN, Dr. JuLius, 43, 161 note, 
Ro Pg 4 18 ZOO fs 220, 252 note. 
Ue I Wendland, Paul, 210. 
SADDUCEES, r15; Westcott, Dr Ol. 
Samaria, 50, 53. Wordsworth, 34, 174 f. notes. 
Sanhedrim, 52, 63, 117. 
Saul, 166. ZEBEDEE, 40, 43, 48. 
Schmiedl, Dr., 14. Zerubbabel, 177. 


Scott, Captain Robert Falconer, 83. Zion, 176, 


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